You would think that reflecting on Mother’s Day would be about my Mom. For some reason this Mother’s Day was filled with thoughts of my Dad.
His birthday is May 11th and while it doesn’t always fall on Mother’s Day it did the year he was born and it did this year. He was also the one to really teach my about the beauty and sacredness of nature, of Mother Earth.
As a little girl I would get up early on Saturday mornings to help him make breakfast. We would go to the feed store in his truck. I wore a hat just like him, the kind that has the plastic holes in the back to adjust the size. I loved spending the day outdoors with him.
I would help him in the garden. My duties might include holding back plants while he rotatiled, gathering eggs or shuttling out ice tea from the house. We would sit back and laugh at our cat as he teased the mockingbird. He brought home a rolling staircase from the air force dump and we would roll it up to the cherry tree and sit in the branches to have a “cherry festival.”
He always noticed things that I didn’t. He would find agates and other treasures in the dirt. I would walk by a ditch with a little water in it only to be told it was a freshwater spring and there was a trout living there.
I could walk by entire worlds of life thinking it was all quite ordinary. I even thought he was quite ordinary.
I am rethinking ordinary.