How do you find your way after the storm? This moving true story shares a hope-filled path from life’s hardest moments to blooming again, with practical lessons in patience, presence, and resilience you can use in your own life.
Life Lessons & Key Themes From This Story
- In seasons of uncertainty, small daily rituals can offer steadiness and strength.
- Every morning you get to decide how you approach the day. You’re more resilient than you think!
- Tend to the small things. Consistent care creates the conditions for growth.
- Even in challenging times, plant seeds (set goals, take action) - conditions are never perfect.
- Waiting for the bloom is part of the process. Patience allows unseen growth to take place.
- Notice the first signs of hope. Small beginnings can lead to beautiful outcomes.
- Letting go can bring peace. Do what you can, with what you have, and release the rest.
- Nature has its own quiet way of teaching patience, presence, and letting go.
- When you feel stuck, reaching out for help can be enough to move forward.
- Caregiving can leave us feeling helpless, but presence itself is a powerful act of love.
- Even after life’s storms have passed, beauty can emerge in ways you never expected.
📍 From the USA: One of many inspiring true stories shared from around the world - honouring resilience, the healing power of presence, and the beauty that can bloom after life’s storms.
In mid-March 2020, fear of the coronavirus closes the doors to my mother’s rehabilitation center, preventing me from helping feed and care for her.
She is 95 years old and slowly recovers from a stroke. Frantic with grief and worry, I sleep poorly and imagine deadly shadows lying behind the lovely pastel facade of early spring.
I cry like a lost soul in the wilderness.
In April , I hang blue, pink, and yellow plastic eggs on the crepe myrtle outside Mama’s window. She sleeps in a wheelchair, both legs swollen.
By mid-month, I decide that I have a choice every morning as to how I will approach the day. I can allow this pandemic to color my days and nights, or I can refuse to let fear control my life. I choose the easier way for me, and walk the grassy fields strewn with purple violets near my apartment, write poetry, and plant Cosmos.
The freshly-tilled garden plot appears unpromising as this spring-- uneven, furrowed rows with big clods of red dirt. Weeds and crabgrass poke out from under the lumps like rows of unkempt hair on semi-bald heads.
I decide that I have a choice every morning as to how I will approach the day.
Unsealing the Cosmo packet, I sprinkle the infinitesimal black dots haphazardly atop the furrows, not bothering to rake the ground first. Then I tamp the seeds into the ground with two fingers, shrug my shoulders, and tell them, “Good luck.”
I know Cosmos to be tough and resilient, able to thrive even in poor, arid ground. The inferior soil – depleted by multiple crops of strawberries – should accommodate them nicely.
Tending to Small Things
A week later, storm clouds blow in and a gray, melancholy rain descends every day for several weeks. Cosmos doesn’t like too much rain, let alone a daily drenching. My heart, too, despite my best efforts, floods with sadness and worry, as I walk by the red clay mudslide on its unprotected, little incline.
Despite the wet, though, small plants soon appear in rows like pale green, feathery soldiers. I divide and divide them again, yanking them out of the oozy ground as if they represented my fears, and plopping them in a vacant spot, applying a mud pack around their roots. They don’t mind.
As white dogwoods and pale pink apple trees blossom in early May, my mother rests comfortably at home. My anxious mood -- hovering like a dark cloud over my head -- lifts slightly knowing that my mother isn’t isolated anymore, and because I can play in the dirt in the gentle spring sunshine. I weed often, waiting for new growth.
On my daily crawl around the flower bed, I continue to jerk weeds and grass out of the mud and to smooth the soil with the flat side of a trowel. Take that doubt; take that dread, I tell myself.
Waiting for the Bloom
By late May, a forest of filmy, emerald plants covers the plot. I carry a bright orange hibiscus for Mother’s Day, but my mother cannot see it. I blink away tears.
The golden sun rises warm and promising on Summer Solstice, but still no pretty flowers. July, ditto. The constant rain never ceases for long.
I can do nothing to heal my mother, but I yearn to succeed with the Cosmos. Frustrated, I call Home Extension. The man sounds young, perplexed, and doesn’t know Cosmos. He says, “You might try feeding them, and, maybe, wait for another week or so.”
I feed them, but nary a bud appears.
One evening in late August, when the sky is red with sunset, I sit down in the midst of the 4-feet foliage, elbows to stems, and ask the Cosmos, “Why aren’t you blooming? What is wrong here? What should I do?”
A mild breeze blows across my face, and the cosmos whispers, “Wait for the harvest.”
First Signs of Hope
I rise from the ground and dust myself off.
In the cool evenings afterward, in the shadow of the bright green stems, I sit and wait crossed-legged in the middle of the garden.
At my mother’s, hospice visits a few times a week now to ease her transition, so much like a spent flower unable to bloom again.
One morning in early September, as the maples turn yellow, I notice one of the more statuesque plants looks different. Its full-bodied, plumy, fluffiness magically has transformed overnight into a sweeping candelabra growing out of the ground. Its delicate stems radiate out from a slender reddish-green stalk. A tiny, abracadabra bud pops out in the afternoon from the tip of one fragile stem.
Finally, I think, at least one flower blooms before the frost!
But then it seems to take forever – all of a week and a half – before the bud opens to reveal eight pale pink, perfect flower petals with golden centers. By that time, a myriad of rosy buds twinkles everywhere on the arms of my flower “menorah.”
A fleeting rain drifts through one night a week later, and the plant topples over from the masses of bloom. I prop Big Fuchsia up and wait for her brethren to join her riotous bloom.
I bide my time. I sing old timey Christian songs with my mother. I am helpless to heal her broken heart or mine. I can only wait as a silent, uprooted witness.
Blooming at Last
By Fall Equinox, little ruby and white waxy-colored marbles form on all twenty-four plants.
The threshold of lightness and dark draws closer now, as the lingering days of summer shorten. Only a small window remains open for the flowers to express their joyous beauty -- just enough time to dance in the autumn wind, surrounded by a fading field of withered brown grass.
Each time I inhale a wistful, faint rose scent, touch a velvet petal, or listen to the buzz of honey bees, I receive a message from the cosmos. I receive a non-verbal message from my mother, too, who speaks little now. It is a message I cling to, like one of the tremulous Monarch butterflies clinging to a blossom, collecting precious nectar,
The cosmos tells me -- despite this present time -- it will provide protection and blessings, like showers of joyful flowers, if I practice patience and faith and take a few intrepid steps in the dance of creation.
In mid-October, my plants become black stalks in a silver field.
My mother passes away in November.
After The Storm, Bloom Your Heart Out
Four years later, I find myself the reluctant bloomer in my own little corner of the universe. But, after a long winter, the signs of spring beckon, and I feel new young shoots of hope and optimism growing within me.
Remembering the Cosmos plants that preserved through mud and mire, downpours and heat, a clumpy infertile soil and a grumpy impatient, gardener -- I recall they bloomed their hearts out -- late, perhaps -- but gloriously flowered, nevertheless, before the frost. How can I do any less?
Meet Susan H. Evans
Hi. I'm Susan, and I recently moved to Baltimore. My daughter has just given birth to my first grandchild. I am thrilled!
I write and teach writing at a community college. I am published in many online and print magazines. Since writing this piece, I have not seen a katydid!
Connect with Susan on her Facebook page here:
www.facebook.com/womanacrossthewater/
READ ANOTHER STORY |
Promise of a Peach Blossom
Inspiring story about hope and healing after hurt ...
