Since I have been taking care of mom's garden most of the time, I am the lucky one who has been picking all her dahlia blooms. It is amazing how many there are. I feel like every day I go outside and a new one has bloomed. As I am gathering them up I always think that I should be giving them away to our family and mom's good friends. She always gave them away. Whenever I came over to visit she would send me home with a vase full for my apartment. My favorite was the year that she grew the huge yellow dinner plate dahlias at the Bagley Street house. The size was outstanding!

This last month I have not been the most social person. I have not given away as many of the flowers as I wanted. Having a passion (my close friends might say obsession!) for photography led me to take some pictures of the blooms. I want to always remember these because she actually grew them herself. I know from now on I will always grow dahlias in my yard but it will probably take me a few years to get them to be as magnificient as hers.

So here are a few of Sally's famous dahlias. If I have not seen you lately then think of them as a virtual bouquet from me and my mom. Thanks for everyone's kind words and support.

Hanna

Poem for Mom

I heard this poet, Kay Ryan, on KCTS just a few days after the memorial. I don't have cable so I watched a lot of The Yankee Workshop and This Old House during the soap opera hours. I had been just floored by the Jane Kenyon poem Steve read at the memorial so when they started interviewing Kay Ryan I stopped flipping and listened. The poem follows and I love it. It makes me tear up a little. Her whole book (The Niagara River) is wonderful - short, simple, amazing little gems of thought that are so personal and so universal.

Things Shouldn't be so Hard
by Kay Ryan

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space -
however small -
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.