The Willow She Never Hurried

At the cottage she loved, there is a willow, with spruce and pine around it, all so tall now that you would assume they had always been there. She planted every one of them small. Her family will tell you she was an outdoor person to her bones, and that what she did with that patch of shoreline was plant, and then wait. Some people write their love letters with a pen. She wrote hers in soil, and was content to wait forty years for the reply.

That patience ran all the way back. Her mother and father had crossed an ocean and built a life out of work, and nerve, and not a great deal else, and like a great many people who arrive with little, they went where the work was. For her father that meant the gold mines, so the family was pulled north into hard country and beautiful country, a long way from the city she was born in. The pictures from those years are full of polka dot dresses, and there was a dog that was part wolf. When she stayed out later than her mother had in mind, her mother did not go looking for her. She sent the dog, and the dog brought her home whether she was finished being out or not.

There was a best friend in those years too, and of everything the two of them got up to, the one she kept was sawing blocks of ice out of a frozen lake as children, in the cold, and finding it good enough and funny enough to still be talking about it eighty years later. That friendship held for a lifetime. Some people find their person early and never need to go looking again, and she would turn out to be one of them twice.

Because when the right thing came along, she knew it. Back in the city in her early twenties, she went to a dance hall down by the water, where a night meant a band and a floor and a crowd, and she and the man she would marry saw each other across it. Her family's word for it is simple: love at first sight. He drove her home that night, and by the time they got there they had agreed to do it again, which was the whole courtship, really. They married, and she flew to their honeymoon, the only time she ever got on a plane in more than ninety years, because she had found what she needed and saw no reason to go back up.

They raised three children in a neighbourhood at the edge of the city, where the church was the end of the road and past it were orchards and farmland and quiet, and the kids grew up watching the city come out to meet them. There were camping trips with the trailer, and a husband who could attach a business call to almost any itinerary, which is how the family came to spend one memorable holiday within easy scent of a working pulp mill. Not every family holiday smells like a postcard.

Then, with the three children still at home and the youngest only eight, she lost him. She did not get a run-up to it, and she did not get a plan. What she got was three young lives, and the next morning, and the one after that. So, not long after, she put the three of them in the car and drove them to Florida. Ask them about it now and it is one of the great times they had with her, the sun and the road and their mother getting them out of that house. It was not a holiday. It was a woman deciding that her children were not going to spend that moment sitting inside the worst thing that had ever happened to them.

From there she did it on her own. She encouraged, she pushed where pushing was needed, and she kept the road open for each of them and made sure they knew they were allowed to take it, and all three found their way to university. She stayed in the next house for more than forty years, right through to the end, and she pulled out every stop at Christmas and Thanksgiving. She was not born a cook, and the early signature dish was burnt burgers in an iron skillet with spaghetti on the side, but she got there, and grew into lasagna, cheesecake and a Christmas turkey that became the whole performance.

She brought that same eye to the hunt. Garage sales, church bazaars, the thrift stores and the curb, which the family calls trash picking with some pride, because she was recycling about thirty years before it had a name. She was looking for the piece of art everybody else had walked past, and she always gave the backing a quick slice to check for a forgotten stock certificate, just in case. She read Vonnegut and trashy novels and the tabloids, because she was interested in people and not fussy about the source. She loved a movie, with one rule enforced without appeal: nobody tells her the plot. If her kids so much as started on something that might spoil it, the channel got changed, no discussion. And she drove well into her late eighties, which says less about the driving than about how long it took anyone to get those keys.

Her youngest daughter came home from school some decades ago, and from then on she shared her mother's days. Her son calls it brave, and selfless, and the rest of the family is grateful for it. When the grandchildren arrived, she took every bit of joy there was to be had in them. And when the end came into view, she was at peace with it. She did not hide it from her children, she told them she loved them, and she made sure they knew she was alright, which is a gift not every family is handed. Her husband had been holding a chair at the table for her for more than forty years.

When a family gathers to remember someone, they rarely talk about the grand plan, because the best lives seldom have one. They talk about the trip thrown together, the table set at Christmas, the find everybody else walked past and the tree planted small. A good life can be built that way, one ordinary day after another, by someone who held it all together on her own and made it look easy.

Who in your life has been quietly planting something for you, and have you told them you can see it growing?

Shared with the family's blessing. Names and places have been left out.

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