In early spring, when the snow reveals the sleepy black earth, my mother and I would take a short walk around my childhood home in northern Michigan. Behind the house, the yard dips lower to reveal a birch-filled marsh where deer have had a path since before I was born. My mother would take my hand, me a teenager just finishing track practice, me a worried twenty-something just starting her career, me a forty-something college professor visiting from Iowa. I can still see her point out every bright green shoot poking out exuberantly in contrast to the dark dirt. Finally, we would reach the edge of red pine trees that merge the back yard with the marsh. We would find our way to the trailing arbutus, which grows right at ground level, insulated by pine needles. The delicate white flower literally creates “trails” along the ground. If you see one blossom, you can be sure that more are near. My mother and I would crouch down on our knees, our noses touching the slight rise in the earth, as we gently pull away layers of wet pine needles, like unwrapping a delicate gift. When we find one white blossom, we are always surprised by how such a tiny flower can create such a gloriously sweet, fruity scent.
The trailing arbutus is a threshold flower. It dares to blossom at a time when winter is most certainly not quite over. My mother died in 2017 from ovarian cancer, and slowly, the piercing, blinding grief has begun to clear so that I might remember, or realize, that all my life, in every trip to the backyard to greet the flowers, to discover, to weed and plant, my mother was preparing me to be able to say goodbye, to allow things to die as they must—but also to embrace the mystery that lives inside everything. She is still teaching me that suffering is part of that mystery, and within that suffering are robust splashes of joy. She taught me that we are all children still seeking Mother—that lost nation of warm lap, soft belly, soothing voice, gentle hands stroking our hair, whispering that everything will be all right.
—Amy Nolan