A Bank of Sweet Peas

... Betty leans over the geraniums ...

Moiya has sweet peas from one end of her front deck to the other, the only interruption in their smooth flow being a set of stairs in the middle of the veranda.

The flowers climb more than six feet high and hang onto netting that hangs from the railing.

Moiya keeps the flowers cut so they keep growing.

Sometimes she delivers a bouquet to Wyona and then one to me.

That is a lot of cutting.

Moiya was gone to Calgary for 5 days and she invited me over to pick some of the flowers while she was gone. 

 ... Betty by the porch stairs ...

The pastel colours of the petals began to fill our hands and we worked our way from the east to the west along Moiya’s vines.

I took a pair of scissors, two pair really, and Betty along with me.

I thought she might cut a flower or two.

I have to half keep my eye on her.  The scissors might as easily cut off a lock of her hair as a stem of sweet peas.

I showed her how to cut the flowers, just the way that my mother taught me, tracing my finger to the bottom of the stem where they spring out of the vine and then cutting them in the fork that is there.

Betty is too young to know how to do that, but it only took her one demo from me and then she set out to cut herself a bouquet, working silently beside me, standing on Moiya’s rock planter, reaching into the vine, cutting beautiful long stems.

The air was redolent with the smell of sweet peas.

If ever I want to feel close to my mother, I can do so while cutting sweet peas.

She is the one who showed me how to run my fingers to the bottom of the stem, how to gather a bouquet in one hand while holding scissors in the other, and how to transfer the flowers to the Tupperware sweet pea vase (a cross grate on the top held the flowers apart).

Moiya said the same thing to me – she rarely is out by the sweet peas but she doesn’t think of Wyora.

Arta