neighbors – Amy Lyles Wilson | Creative Soul Tender

Last Monday night, it was a homeowners’ association meeting, in which people who supposedly live in community talked over one another and complained about the color of the flowers in the bed at the entrance to the subdivision. They’re blooming, so they look fine to me, but apparently a handful of people are horrified—horrified, I tell you!—that the colors aren’t different from last year. The fact that anyone remembers what the flowers looked like last year gives me pause, but I was so busy trying not to jump out of my skin that I didn’t have the energy to whisper a snarky remark to my neighbor sitting next to me. Martha would be proud.

On Tuesday night, it was twenty people who were strangers to one another a month ago in my pastoral care training class at a local hospital, in which we listened to one another and came together on issues much bigger than a pansy palette.

Wednesday was meditation group, led by a husband-wife team, in which the wife is dying of cancer and living out her last days with us in such a state of grace, acceptance, and peace that I can scarcely speak of it. Being in that sacred space gives me hope and lessens my fear. {Insight Nashville}

Thursday brought time with one of those friends you don’t have to see often to love much. {Hey Louise!}

On Friday I was thanked for doing nothing more than listening with intention, and Saturday found me writing with eight wise and tender souls. We call it the “magic table,” in reference to all the great stuff that’s created around it, but it’s not the table, of course. It’s the risks these women take with me, month after month.

Last week ended with pink peonies and a puppy named Hiram. Who knows what this week might bring?

When I was about five, my family moved from one subdivision to another in my hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. Soon after we arrived, a woman came from next door to welcome us to the neighborhood. Mother told me to go out back and play while they visited. So I did. After roaming around for a bit with my Labrador sidekick, Sloopy, I found the longest row of daffodils, all yellow and good smelling, lining one side of the yard. I picked a bunch of them, delighting in my discovery, and took them in to Mother, my chubby fingers wrapped around the stems.

“Here,” I said, offering up my bounty. “These are for you.”

“Oh no,” said my mother. “Those don’t belong to us. You shouldn’t have done that.”

Somehow she knew what I didn’t, that the flowers bloomed on the property next to ours, owned by the nice woman sitting on the couch. She was lovely about it, this new friend, but my mother was not amused.

The neighbor, Mrs. Wise, and I laughed about it when I was older, with her telling me I could pick those flowers anytime, that she just wanted people to enjoy them.

The last time I saw her she brought a card to my father in the hospital after he collapsed in a restaurant while eating lunch. Once again Mrs. Wise and I spoke of the daffodils, although she was well into her eighties then and said she had no memory of my indiscretion. Why would she?

Why do I? Because of the shame of it, perhaps, one of those early scoldings we think we didn’t deserve. An early embarrassment. Or maybe it was my first meaningful encounter with a daffodil.

“But I wouldn’t have minded if you picked those flowers whenever you wanted,” she said as we visited in the lobby of Baptist Hospital on North State Street.

“This is for Earl,” she continued, handing me the card. “Get well soon,” it read.

Daddy died the next day, Mrs. Wise several years later.

Every spring when I pick daffodils in my own yard in Tennessee, I think of them both, a neighbor and a father who made lasting impressions on me.

Tag: neighbors

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Stealing My Neighbor’s Daffodils