When Love Takes Root

When Mom moved out to the woods and carved out not just her log cabin, but a small patch of yard, she decided she wanted her favorite blooming plant.

So she went and got a permit to dig up a native rhododendron.

The state officials gave her the specific boundary, and she drove a couple hours over a washboard gravel road to reach the designated spot.

With a shovel in hand and a small backpack carrying her lunch, she set out in search of the right one.

Being a librarian, she’d already done her homework—researching the best season and the right size plant for transplanting. So, she walked, and walked, and walked.

Then she saw it. A small one—almost as if it had been waiting to be chosen.

When she told me the story, I teased her. I said she made it sound like she was adopting a dog from a kennel.

She smiled and said, “It was.”

She brought it home and planted it in her “yard”—really just a gentle claiming of space in the wilderness she loved.

The first year, it barely bloomed. But the next year, it came alive.

Mom would send me pictures—because I never could visit when it was in full bloom.

I had to admit—her adopted rhododendron was fully at home.

A few years after Mom passed, we moved to her place.

That first spring, I noticed the rhody getting ready to bloom. And it did, right on Mother’s Day.

It felt like she was visiting. And it bloomed every Mother’s Day for decades.

Until a couple years ago.

After nearly fifty years, it stopped blooming. Then its branches grew bare, slowly gathering moss, the life it once showed was now quiet and fading. I knew it was time. I cut it down myself.

But I couldn’t bring myself to throw it on the burn pile. Instead, I kept it—the moss-covered limbs weathered and worn—as a reminder.

A reminder of the love that carried it from the wild to her yard.

A reminder of the love of a mother who worked, sacrificed, and gave so much so that I could bloom in my own way.

This Mother’s Day, maybe there’s something you hold—something in your hands or tucked away in your heart—that reminds you of her love.

Hold onto it.

Because love, once planted well, has a way of lasting far longer than we expect.