When I was a kid, my mom had a spell of growing red geraniums. She even had my dad mount window box brackets inside the south-facing windows in the kitchen so that she could keep her geraniums alive through the long, harsh Vermont winters. Crimson flowers and ruffly dark green foliage were cheerful to have around during the months when everything seemed endlessly white and grey. In the spring after the threat of frost had passed, she’d bring the window boxes out to the exterior brackets and set them up, then spend all summer tending to the geraniums out there. Watering, dead-heading, fertilizing. She could make most green things grow and she often had flower beds around the house every summer as well, but the geraniums were her pride. She loved how the bright flowers popped against the light grey siding of the house, how you could see them from Route 5, glowing in the afternoon sun. At some point she got over the overwintering geraniums phase – probably because they made a mess and she had enough to do without also having to clean up drifts of shed flower petals every few days. Even after she gave up having them inside, she would still get a couple of large baskets of red geraniums to hang from brackets on the front of the house every summer. 

Dad built a porch on the front of their house a few years back. He built it from the ground up, exactly to his and mom’s specifications: tile floors that could be swept clean of the road dust that accumulated from living close to a busy main road, sturdy wide trim around the top of the balusters so that friends could sit or lean comfortably if all the seats were taken, plenty of room for a table and chairs to accommodate outdoor dinners in the evening sunshine. And big sturdy hooks installed along the beams to hold heavy hanging planters overflowing with frilly green foliage and crimson flowers. The porch was their happy place in the warmer months – they had meals out there every chance they could, and company was always directed out to the porch to sit and visit when the weather was good. 

After mom died last spring, my dad went and got two huge hanging baskets of red geraniums to hang on the porch just like always. He didn’t know how to take care of the geraniums except to water them, but he wanted that reminder of her for the summer. He would often send me pictures of the view from his seat at the porch table: his drink in front of him, his reading glasses sitting off to the side, a citronella oil candle burning to keep the bugs away, early evening sun beating in from the southwest, and always one of the baskets of red geraniums in the background. One time he sent me a picture of one tiny, forlorn, broken egg on the tile floor amidst a scattering of red geranium petals. A little song bird (we never did figure out what kind) had made her nest right in the middle of one of the hanging baskets and laid at least one egg. Whether by mistake, misadventure, or by some plan that made perfect sense to the bird but wouldn’t to us, the egg had fallen out of the nest and ended up on the floor of the porch. Dad left the nest in the basket hoping that the bird would come back and try again but she never did. 

At the end of the summer dad started asking me if I’d take one of the baskets of geraniums home. He wanted me to take them both but they were huge and my 1100 square foot house is not compatible with such monsters. I finally relented and agreed to take one of the baskets. It was so big that I had to clear everything off the top of my dresser in order to accommodate it in a spot that would get enough sun. I’d never taken care of geraniums either, aside from occasionally helping mom water or dead-head hers. Crucially, I also did not inherit her green thumb – where she could make most any green thing grow, I was continually finding new and innovative ways to kill just about any plant that came into my house. Even the “bomb proof” standards like pothos and snake plants have had some close calls in my questionable care. So, I took this hulking geranium in with a healthy amount of skepticism, along with a promise to myself that I wouldn’t beat myself up if it croaked. 

The first couple months of having the geranium went fine. I had to water it in my bathtub because it wouldn’t fit into my kitchen sink, and every watering session resulted in a trail of blood red petals being shed from the spare room to the bathroom and back, but I swept them up and did my best. As we got into the dark months of winter my brain took the predictable downturn that being trapped under feet of snow for weeks on end tends to bring on for me. Terrible things going on in the world didn’t help, nor did the grief that I was still learning to ride the waves of. Which is all to say, I got really fucking depressed and could barely take care of myself for a while there, let alone go into the spare room to drag this massive plant to the bathtub to water it, let it drain, then drag it back to its spot, THEN clean up the mess it created. I would go in and pick the dried-up leaves off it sometimes when I had the energy, and I’d promise myself that maybe that coming weekend I’d water it, especially since the flowers had all died off at that point and there would be no petal mess. I don’t think I managed to water it from December onward, though. 

Around late April, probably close to the anniversary of mom’s death in fact, but I can’t track it exactly to then, the snow had finally mostly melted in the driveway so that I could get over to the makeshift compost pile again. Not so much a proper compost pile really as more of just kind of a graveyard for previously green things. I throw gone-by cut flowers out there, corn husks, the remains of whatever annuals I’ve had potted up on the patio for the summer, stuff like that. But I don’t go so far as to actually get out there with a pitchfork and turn it or water it or anything. I’m not looking to get compost out of it. I’m just pitching stuff back to Mother Nature and letting her do her thing. Anyway, around late April, I decided it was time. The geranium wasn’t fully dead – it still had some leaves – but I didn’t think there was any saving it and I was sick of feeling bad whenever I went into that room and saw it. Plus, even if I COULD bring it back, I truly didn’t want to deal with the mess the flowers made. Geraniums just aren’t the plant for me. So, I gathered up the whole mess of crispy leaves and scraggly branches, wished it well on its journey, and rather unceremoniously heaved it over the stone wall into the plant graveyard. I sent up an apology to my mom at the time, though I know she wouldn’t have faulted me a bit for the decision. She could make most things grow but she also understood the value of not making life harder than it needs to be – especially in a housekeeping capacity. I cleaned off the top of the dresser and put some other stuff there to fill the void that removing the green monster had created. 

Fast forward through a spring and summer of various dramas big and small. Today is the last day of August and we’re on the precipice of another round of darkness. The smell of autumn is in the air even though it’s 78 degrees out. The dog and I tootled around the edge of the driveway in our normal manner earlier: him with his nose to the ground and me with my face to the sky, both of us enjoying the sunshine while we could. As we came along the side of the stone wall I noticed a very out of place flash of crimson in the otherwise solidly green underbrush. A cardinal maybe? We had scarlet tanagers most of the summer but they’ve headed south by now. The red wasn’t moving at all though and that’s not the way of most birds. I leaned over so I could get a better look, then gasped. There in the middle of a tangle of wild blackberry brambles, oak, and beech saplings, was a single blood-red geranium flower head sticking up proudly. It was small but it was unmistakable, with several of the tell-tale frilly and fuzzy bright green geranium leaves right next to it. 

That mostly-dead plant had survived being upended from its pot and left to fend for itself in one of the wettest springs, followed by one of the driest and hottest summers we’ve ever seen. It had not only not croaked, but it had BLOOMED. Those near-neon red flowers bobbed lightly in the breeze as I stared in disbelief. 

I do not believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe that my loved ones are smiling down on me from any kind of heaven. What I do believe in is energy. All matter is, at its most base level, energy. Rocks, plants, people, even plastic or glass…it’s all just energy holding various forms. When something living dies, its energy doesn’t just disappear. It gets slowly absorbed by myriad other life forms, as well as getting released back into the world as heat and light. I also believe energy can, to a certain extent, sometimes “stick” to things. I don’t believe that geranium IS my mom, but I do believe that enough of her energy was around those plants last summer while they lived on her porch, while they witnessed her loved ones repeatedly laugh and cry and share memories of her, that a little bit of it stuck. It came home with me (like other bits of her did in other forms – pictures, clothing, etc). It hung on through a long dark winter of neglect, it allowed me to let it go when I took the plant outside to the compost pile, and it stuck around all summer so that I could see it today and think about my mom again in yet a new way. 

Because I think that’s what most of grief is, after all – it’s a process of thinking about the thing you lost over and over again but in subtly different ways. It’s like a stone rolling back and forth on the beach through wave after wave. Some waves knock a little of the sharp edge off. Other waves are so strong they push the stone far up on the beach out of the reach of the waves for a while until an especially high tide comes along and pulls it back in to be rolled back and forth some more. Eventually, after much rolling, much thinking, you’re left with something smoother. It will probably always be a little bit hard – you wouldn’t want to walk a mile with it in your shoe – but it’s not really sharp enough to cut you anymore. 

I could make analogies about that geranium plant being tough like my mom, or tell myself stories about how it surviving was some kind of sign from her and then try to interpret what it means on a deeper level…but that’s not really me. The reality is that it was an interesting coincidence, it made me smile, and I am grateful to have seen it. I am grateful for the chance to remember my mom in another way and to recall some of the energy she shared with the world.