My Mother's Flowers

An apartment is no ideal home for beautiful flowers. Yet, on a balcony in rent-controlled Manhattan, I grew up alongside a small colony of sunflowers. They lived in chipped clay pots covered in my hand-painted polka dots. Like my mother, the flowers found comfort in a foreign land, surrounding themselves with the smells of street garbage and vibrant Hindi. The soft yellow flowers absorbed the artificial sun of low lying skyscrapers. In this urban environment, they learned to strive. My mother gave life to her botanic children on our balcony for years, coddling a collection of foreign objects called sunflowers. 

As they grew, the sunflowers faced the sun during the day, and my mother during the night. I assumed the flowers changed their orientation in an effort to make the sun jealous; my mother was just as radiant but not nearly as distant. On rushed mornings, my mother would greet them and tow my sunflower-sized body out of my bedroom before school. “Good morning!” she’d say to all of us while placing my lightup sneakers on my feet. My mother dressed in colorful prints and sneakers, a look that impressed both her flowers and school children. At night, those same sneakers dragged a bit more on the floor as my mother entered our apartment. The flowers would greet her at the balcony and beg water from the same old apple cider jug that we used as a watering can. The skinny bodies would drink the water up from their feet and await the next morning when the cycle of greetings and feedings would repeat.

When one died, my mother sat alone and silent, reading a Japanese newspaper. I snuck onto the balcony and fetched the corpse in order to give it a proper service. For her, the death was like losing a loved one, and I was in the business of doing whatever it took to make my mother happy. I broke the stem and brought the enormous flower into our apartment. The body lightly tapped our caramel carpeted floor as I brought it in. My small feet were not able to stop the balcony door from slamming and my mother’s back straightened in response. She turned to see her young daughter trying to lug a dead flower to the kitchen and began to smile softly. Soon, the smile turned into a giggle. My mother looked at me and said, “You know, sunflower seeds are excellent snacks.” I smiled back. We grabbed spoons and took turns harvesting the seeds that would soon populate Ziploc bags in my lunchbox. My mother and I spent that night celebrating rather than mourning the death of her sunflower.

Not much has changed since my flower-filled childhood. Sunflowers continue to find themselves in the care of my mother, only now they sit, seething and blooming, in the natural light of our new suburban home. The only distinct differences are that I am finally taller than the stems that once towered over me, and my mother’s collection of colorful outfits has grown. To this day, my mother whispers to me during late hours, “Life is a flower in which love is the honey.” The night before every birthday, she drags her feet lightly into my bedroom and in the morning, I wake to discover bouquets of lilies or tulips on my tea-stained windowsill. Next to the flowers sits a handwritten note in her broken English and I stick it on the wall alongside the other ones. As I have grown, my mother’s love of me and her flowers has been a constant. Whenever walking past a large field of flowers, I am always reminded of my mother.