The Watering Can
A Mother, A Daughter, Continuity and Conflicts
The battered old watering can sits unobtrusively in its spot on the corner shelf, below the ivy that I have never quite managed to kill. Each day, when the guilt from looking at my wilting tomatoes finally spurs me to action, I fill the can and water the plants on the balcony: tomatoes, peppers, basil, even a morning glory that insists on flowering in the afternoon. Those flowers sum up my relationship with plants — moments of beauty, but not when I expect them.
I can’t water plants without thinking of my mother. Our house was filled with plants: tubby cacti, towering Dieffenbachia, and a scraggly Charlie Brown-style pine that served as a quasi-Christmas tree, undecorated but presiding over a pile of gifts. Plants filled the house, and in summer they spilled onto the front porch.
Mom’s gardens dominated the back yard. Blooming hedges of lilacs and forsythias in the spring, a maple tree that turned deep crimson in the autumn, snowball bushes and rhododendrons all summer. Oak trees for shade, in those years before central air conditioning. And two large vegetable patches.
We all worked to make Mom’s vision a reality, digging up and planting in the spring, digging under in the autumn and of course watering, with a heavy rubber hose that was always tangled…
