Once a Hostess, Always a Hostess!

The daffodils arrive, 400 of them.

Sven helps prepare the soil. It will take quite a while to get all these bulbs in the ground. I check in on Bea from time to time. She ate cream of wheat this morning, then went back to sleep.

In the house, I find my mother chatting softly to herself and assume she has just awakened from the nap. I flop down in the chair beside her bed, lean over, and confide, “I’m tired.”

“I’m tired, too,” she says although sleep has been her predominate state recently. No, scratch that: over the past three days hibernation is a better description.

“Did you have pleasant dreams?” I ask.

“Oh, I wasn’t dreaming,” Bea says in her busy-body voice, the one she used to use all the time. “I was busy.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Seeing that everybody got something to eat. And what have you been up to?”

“Planting daffodils. You like daffodils?”

Bea’s face fills with delight. “Oh, yes! They’re the first spring flower.”

“Want to hear some music – Frank Sinatra, or the Italian singer?”

“Sinatra. And they’re both Italian,” Bea points out.

I leave my smart-aleck mother to her guests and return to my garden…