The White Gardenia

Every year on my birthday, from the time I turned 12,
one white gardenia was delivered anonymously to me at
my house. There was never a card or note, and calls to
the florist were in vain, because the purchase was always
made in cash. After a while, I stopped trying to discover
the identity of the sender. I just delighted in the beauty
and heady perfume of that one magical, perfect white
flower nestled in folds of soft pink tissue paper. But I
never stopped imagining who the sender might be. Some
of my happiest moments were spent in day dreams about
someone wonderful and exciting, but too shy or eccentric
to make known his or her identity. In my teen years, it was
fun to speculate that the sender might be a boy I had a crush
on, or even someone I didn't know who had noticed me.

My mother often contributed to my speculations. She'd ask
me if there was someone for whom I had done a special kindness,
who might be showing appreciation anonymously. She reminded
me of the times when I'd been riding my bike and our neighbor
drove up with her car full of groceries and children. I always
helped her unload the car and made sure the children didn't
run into the road. Or maybe the mystery sender was the old
man across the street. I often retrieved his mail during the
winter, so he wouldn't have to venture down his icy steps.

My mother did her best to foster my imagination about the
gardenia. She wanted her children to be creative. She also
wanted us to feel cherished and loved, not just by her, but
by the world at large.

When I was 17, a boy broke my heart. The night he called
for the last time, I cried myself to sleep. When I awoke in
the morning, there was a message scribbled on my mirror in
red lipstick: "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods
arrive." I thought about that quotation from Emerson for a
long time, and I left it where my mother had written it until
my heart healed. When I finally went for the glass cleaner,
my mother knew that everything was all right again.

But there were some hurts my mother couldn't heal. A month

before my high school graduation, my father died suddenly
of a heart attack. My feelings ranged from simple grief

to abandonment, fear, distrust and overwhelming anger that my
dad was missing some of the most important events in my life.

I became completely uninterested in my upcoming graduation,

the senior-class play and the prom - events that I had worked

on and looked forward to. I even considered staying home to

attend college instead of going away as I had planned because

it felt safer.

My mother, in the midst of her own grief, wouldn't hear of me
missing out on any of these things. The day before my father
died, she and I had gone shopping for a prom dress and had
found a spectacular one -- yards and yards of dotted Swiss
in red, white and blue. Wearing it made me feel like Scarlett
O'Hara. But it was the wrong size, and when my father died
the next day, I forgot all about the dress.

My mother didn't. The day before the prom, I found the

dress waiting for me -- in the right size. It was draped
majestically over the living room sofa, presented to me
artistically and lovingly. I may not have cared about having
a new dress, but my mother did.

She cared how we children felt about ourselves. She imbued
us with a sense of the magic in the world, and she gave us the
ability to see beauty even in the face of adversity.

In truth, my mother wanted her children to see themselves
much like the gardenia -- lovely, strong, perfect, with an aura
of magic and perhaps a bit of mystery.

My mother died when I was 22, only 10 days after I was
married.

That was the year the gardenias stopped coming.

~By Marsha Arons~
from "Chicken Soup For A Woman's Soul"

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