‘People typically associate spring blooms with mothers and Mother’s Day, but plants make me think of my dad’
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He had amassed a jumbled collection of houseplants and a few scattered shrubs in the yard – a patch of Chinese chives out back; a honeysuckle bush by his front door – when, in April, 2020, doctors found an aggressive tumour in his stomach. Over the next few months of increasingly desperate treatments, his ability to tend to his plants became my barometer of his well-being.
I thought of the honeysuckle bush outside, which, in bloom, had tossed its fragrance my way each time I had walked through the doors of my dad’s home – the home he had lived in for nearly two decades; the home he now had to sell for the same reasons he parted with his plants.
At home after the funeral, I placed the plastic bucket with the honeysuckle cuttings in a corner of my husband’s office, and out of my mind. “It’s just a plant,” I reminded myself, knowing my dad would have scoffed at ascribing deeper significance to keeping these cuttings alive. Dad would have scoffed at ascribing deeper significance to keeping these cuttings alive.
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