Trash Flowers

My imagination doesn’t just get the best of me; it is the best part of me.

I had a very typical mother’s day, splitting time, the meals and candy, cards and nice gestures. My mother insisted I donate to charity instead of gifting her this year, and I chose the Tennessee flood as my worthy charity.

I spent the afternoon in Newport Beach and took an autoferry to Balboa Island. I braved the wind, and enjoyed a burger and malt on the pier. At days end as I held my breath past the beach bathroom I saw a bit of plastic poking out of the public trashcan. Blame it on the crowd, a crowd full of the homeless and those in use of metal detectors, I reached my hand right in that trash can and pulled out – lilies. They were beautiful lilies, baby lilies, not yet to maturation or in bloom. I did a mental review of the 5 second rule, and be it mother’s day, lots of other mother sort of advice. Don’t pick that up. Look both ways. Don’t drive so fast. Cross your legs. Say your pleases and thank yous. I couldn’t recall a rule about retrieving perfectly lovely flowers from a trash can.

In the 4th grade my frog died. We had gone to Circuit City to get our family a new refrigerator, and when I arrived home, on the bookcase in the living room, stretched as far as a desert mile, was my frog. We learned in the days to follow that this particular genre of frogs needed to be fed live food, and my cheap bloodworms didn’t satisfy his hearty appetite. I’d killed him. If was too young to have murder on my hands, but I also too young to understand the frog burial process.

“Rebecca, we will need to dispose of it.”

These 8 words sent me in to a fury few save Naomi Campbell could replicate.

We agreed until I calmed down we’d keep it in a Ziploc bag in the garage refrigerator (remember we’d gotten a new one now!).

Every other day my mother would bring up that damn frog. And every time she would send me in to a panicked state. I have to imagine there was a point my Mom figured she’d have to send me off to college, when the time came, with Ziploc in hand. Or down the aisle to meet my groom, ziploc in tow.

Death is hard to accept.

Two weeks to the day, the day of the big refrigerator purchase, and of the untimely murder, my Mom tried yet again. This time she had a plan.

“Rebecca do you know what dispose means?”

I hadn’t. For 2 weeks every time she spoke that word, I imagined my little friend, frog legs being chopped up in our kitchen disposal, cutting in a continual circular sort of way.

“It just means throw away. Do you think we can throw away the frog today?”

Oh, when you put it that way, sure. Why didn’t you just come out and say that?

I’m not going to pretend like being my mom is the easiest job in the world. But then again I’ve never seen a mug that says that. “Motherhood: The Easiest Job in the World”. It wasn't easy when one of my first words was "damnit" and my mom learned of this as I yelled it repeatedly from our front porch trying to put together a puzzle. Or when I brought home a failed test in the 2nd grade for her to sign, and instead signed it myself in the biggest 2nd grader handwriting you ever saw, and returned it to my teacher. Or when my mother explained the birds and the bees to me in junior high, and not believing her theory on how all that works, asked for further proof from the library.

As I stood at the trash can, and I rewinded and flash forwarded 30 years of lessons and the difficulties of parenting me, I couldn’t recall anything wrong with snarking perfectly lovely flowers from a trash can, either through linguistic misunderstanding or otherwise.

I stood and held those flowers and my mind journeyed through a dramatic scenario that would have landed those flowers in a public trash can on a California beach. My embarkment to the car surely by minutes missed, what was probably a very public display of anger, yelling, hands being thrown and tossed about every which way. See being a mother, and being a daughter, or being a mother, and being a son, is never an easy relationship, and in no way is this the first time you have heard these words. My mom on a cocktail of Valium and Oxycontin (post surgery) enjoyed her day. But through the haziness of narcotics she will acknowledge it’s a bumpy road, and it’s also alright to say so.

So I took those flowers, in essence because no one was looking, and not recalling my lessons to the contrary - and left them that evening at my boyfriend’s family’s home. They had seen their origins and leaving them there was more convenient than lugging them everywhere I would be from that night until today.

This morning I got a text that read, “I just wanted you to know your trash flowers look great!”

I laughed – you know, because that’s funny. But also because I find my trash flowers symbolic of the beauty and the source of love flowers come from, and how that love can be so difficult to express, and to understand, and communicate.

So my wish for the universe is to whomever those flowers came from, and whoever they were meant for, shall you realize the depth and breadth of love the connects mother to daughter and sons to their mother.

Oh yeah, and thank you for my flowers.