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Daffodils sprouted by the woodpile where my mom grew up in southeastern Guilford County in the 1950s and ’60s, and irises clustered at the well house. A scattering of trees — pear, fig, persimmon — dropped their fruits near the chicken coop, but aside from that, no other blooming flowers grew around her house. Back then, in such a rural area, people didn’t cultivate those kinds of gardens. The field in front of her house was filled with tobacco, for extra money, and potatoes and corn, for extra food.

“We had a yard, not a lawn,” my mom says. She and her brothers were careful running barefoot around those fruit trees, which attracted bees, and never once gave a thought to what a marigold or a begonia might look like.

In 1968, my mom met my dad and got married, and I came along shortly after. We lived in a small bungalow in Asheboro with a front porch that my mom filled with large ferns that hung from the eaves. Ten years later, we moved out to the country, to a brick house on a hill, with a few acres of woods and oak trees and sunny spots that fed thick patches of green grass. As a teenager in the ’80s, I’d unfold a lawn chair in those sunny spots to work on a tan, and I’d cringe on weekends when my dad — to me, so old in his 40s — would pull off his T-shirt and crank up the push mower, tending proudly to what was becoming a lawn, not just a yard.

He and my mom got a credit card for the new Lowe’s Hardware that had opened, and they stocked the garage with rakes and tools, hoses and pruners. My dad bought a wheelbarrow and a riding lawn mower. He built a workbench.

In 1995, the year Lowe’s opened a larger store in Asheboro — with a garden center attached — my dad had open-heart surgery. He recuperated that winter by keeping busy, sitting at his workbench and building small birdhouses. Symbols of optimism and renewal.

It seemed that he always needed some sort of nail or screw, and my mom, not quite ready for him to drive by himself, accompanied him on his trips to Lowe’s. By the spring, he’d recovered, but my parents’ outings to Lowe’s had become their weekend ritual, so they kept going. One afternoon, they wandered the aisles of plants in the garden center, enthralled by rows of brightly colored flowers, by the profusion of flame orange marigolds and pinwheel petunias. Signs of hope and happiness.

That day, they loaded up the car with flats of plants and hauled everything home, spending a season digging garden beds all around our house. For the next 18 years, my parents filled our patch of earth on the hill with golden daylilies, blazing marigolds, purple impatiens. My dad affixed his birdhouses to posts and set them all in the ground, rising among the flowers. I wish you could’ve seen how beautiful it all was.

My mom’s patch of earth is smaller now, a square of green outside the kitchen window at her town house in Greensboro, where my parents moved a few years before my dad died. They still made their weekend trips to Lowe’s, filling pots and hanging baskets with marigolds and cascading petunias, adapting to their new surroundings.

As the weather warms, my mom will soon be out there again in the sun, tending her flowers and smiling to herself, carrying on for another season. A sign of strength and resilience. Just the way my dad would’ve wanted. Exactly how he would’ve hoped.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief