Lilies

My lilies of the valley are late this year.  By now, I am usually seeing their bright green shoots poking out of the ground, reaching for the sun.  It’s been a long, cold winter, so maybe they slept a little more deeply this year.  My particular lilies came from the garden of Scott’s Aunt Jane. In her garden, there is everything from beautiful roses to butter beans (I can’t eat butter beans without thinking of Jane.  I never learned to like them, but it makes me smile thinking about her passion for butter beans).   Jane’s garden in North Carolina is beautiful.  Whenever we would visit in the spring, she would give me various plants she had thinned from her ever-growing garden.  I’d leave there with high hopes and dreams of beautiful plants in our yard, and often, those plants didn't even survive the 6 hour drive home to Virginia.  The ones that did, they weren't happy in our clay soil.  But those lilies of the valley-- 4 or 5 of them survived, and I planted them in the bed in front of our house.  There are at least 50 of them last year.  I meant to ask Jane about how to thin them out on our last visit in December.  I forgot. Probably because we didn't spend any time in her sleeping garden.  Jane died unexpectedly this past week. 

Jane’s time in the hospital was spent treating people not as, herself, a patient.  83 years old, she was the picture of health. More active than most of us, I confess, our visits with her left me exhausted.  It was hard to keep up with her.  She knew every trail on and around Grandfather Mountain.  She would stop and point out every interesting plant, flower, and wildlife along the way.  She knew the people of that area, even more intimately.  She had spent decades getting to know all of them.  She knew who needed food, who needed clothing and who needed encouragement.  She found it for them, sometimes providing it herself.

When she retired, she married Kenneth, who, like Jane, lived and cared for the community around him.  The two were a perfect match.  Kenneth became our family. Together, in retirement, they continued to provide more for their community than most people are able in a lifetime.   If there was a need, they found a way to meet it.  They understood about feeding sheep.

Jane was a gardener—not just of plants, but of lives.  She embodied Micah 6:8:  She did justice, she loved kindness and walked humbly with God. She fought injustice and inequality, she founded a women’s shelter for domestic violence, and she became involved in her patients’ lives-- even paying for their prescriptions out of her own pocket when they could not afford it.  Those were seeds she was planting, a garden she was cultivating—a garden that was meant to resemble God’s kingdom.  All of those lives she touched, like her lilies, propagated and created new life.

I wait even more eagerly for the fragrance of those lilies this year.  I find myself grateful that they are late this year.  And when time comes to thin them out, let me know if you would like a couple.  I think that would have made Jane happy to see her garden growing beyond her reach.