After the snow melts and the mud season has come and gone, the earth warms and the flowers come up through the ground again, uninterested in my midwinter pessimism or in my giddy May-time joy at the miracle of their return. They have work to do: stems to grow, buds to nurture, blooms to put forth into the air, just as the flowers did when my mother was clipping her neighbor’s forsythia and my aunt was reciting poetry to trees and my grandmother was inviting gladiolas to the festivity of her perennial borders, but not to her funeral. 

from Two Lives by Reeve Lindbergh (Brigantine Media)