Flowers for the Teacher

Teach your children well. . . .

When we visited home the other day, I dug up a bunch of plants from my parents' yard to bring back and plant in our own yard. The planting seems to have gone well, everything is being watered regularly, the bunnies are leaving it all alone (so far!), and it looks like the plants are doing just fine.

The last thing I did before I left home, as I was sitting on the front porch talking with my little sister and her daughter, was to run down and grab an armload of lilacs from the lilac bush by the drive way. It was full to overflowing with blooms and the scent was everywhere in their yard.

I only grabbed that one kind. I wish now I'd picked some of all three: the deeper purple, the double white, and this regular purple variety. The lilac bouquet is sitting in our kitchen window now, and it smells absolutely DIVINE. I bet you wish this blip entry was scratch and sniff!

When I was little, when the lilacs came into bloom, my father would always take out his skinny little pocket knife (which was skinny because he used it all the time, and as he sharpened it, the blade got smaller and smaller). And he'd cut a bouquet of flowers for each of us kids to give to our teacher at school.

Just a couple of sprigs of blooms, purple and/or white, each bouquet wrapped in a wet paper towel, and then in aluminum foil, which we scrunched up so that the water wouldn't drip out on the school bus, as we carried our treasures in our hands.

As I recall, the gifts were always well received, and placed upon the teacher's desk where everyone could enjoy them. It seems such an old-fashioned thing now, and in these days of virtual everything, I wonder if anyone gives actual physical gifts to the teacher anymore. 

I look at our bouquet in the kitchen window, and every time I see it and smell it, I hear my father's voice: Flowers for the teacher, he says. I reach out my hand, and I take the flowers. And he smiles, and I smile back at him.

Our soundtrack song is Crosby, Stills, and Nash, with Teach Your Children.