Our Weekend

The last time I saw Ruth alive I was at her house picking up Champ...she'd been nice enough to dog sit while we were in Chicago and Nauvoo. If you've seen Ruth's yard, you know it was "naturally landscaped." I couldn't get over the number of flowers growing in her yard, and it so happened that year I was on the hunt for flowers for some of our flower beds. I asked Ruth if I could come dig up some of the flowers from her yard when the weather got cooler. She had plans to plant grass and said, "Take all you want."

That fall Ruth was gone but the flowers were still there. When it got cooler, I did dig up some flowers from her yard and brought them home and planted them in what we were then calling "The Ruth Garden," because her rusty planter from in front of her house and Joie's "Pole Canyon" sign were there. I was so disappointed when the flowers didn't live, but as luck would have it, the house hadn't sold by the following spring, and there were those same flowers, growing up in their yard where there would have been grass. I tried once again to dig up and replant flowers from her yard, carefully marking each spot where a flower was planted with a rock. I watered them faithfully and checked them daily, but once again the flowers died. By that time the house had sold, and my opportunity had passed to bring some of Ruth's flowers to my yard. At that point, I didn't want to do anything with that garden. In my frustration and disappointment, I began thinking that if I couldn't have her flowers there, maybe there just wouldn't even be a Ruth Garden. For the rest of the summer I let that flower bed go to weeds, and didn't touch it again until last Saturday. With the help of Jeran, Megan, and Joie, we were raking out flower beds and cleaning up the yard. Joie wanted to rake so I told her to go rake all the weeds out of the Ruth Garden. She had a question about what to rake so I walked up there to show her and below are pictures of what I found...three of the over 20 plants I tried to move from Ruth's house to my garden were growing. After a two attempts and a year of dormancy, there they were. I knelt down and started gently pulling grass and weeds away from the flowers and thought as I did of all the life lessons there are in nature. I consider this my Easter Surprise, and we think we may now call this "The Easter Garden."

Each plant was different. They're all wild flowers, and only one of each variety survived. This one is a daisy variety...don't know the name, but we had some at our old house and I liked them. They're orange and yellow with a brown center.

This one grows tall blue flowers on it...again, don't know the name.

This one...not sure. I dug it up because I thought it was pretty. Joie tells me she thinks it's "stinkweed." That would be just like me to think a weed was pretty and dig it up. If Joie's right and this is stinkweed, we'll name this one Audrey.

Then on Sunday, Jeran and Joie wanted to go to Cedar Fort. We found some Easter signs on Audrey's grave, drawn by children. The pictures say, "I love Jesus." One is from someone named Dewi and one is from someone named Arlee. At the bottom of one is written, "Happy Easter Little Audrey."