Learning To Love The Valleys

Introduction

 

As a child I lived in a big house in White Plains, New York, surrounded with all kinds of flowering bushes and gardens bursting with color.  My father spent most of his leisure time working in the yard to create a vast variety of fragrances and colorful celebration.  He trimmed the lilac bushes, cultivated the many rose bushes with roses climbing trellises, and worked in the gardens of multicolored flowers bursting from their stems.  Our long driveway was lined with beautiful flowers, and often bouquets would surprise my mother, cut and placed in pretty vases by my father.   Neighbors and visiting relatives always commented and complimented the flowers of our yard.   Many times friends who were hospitalized received special flowers from our gardens.   Not many people knew that my father was colorblind.

 

However, I remember going often to the side of the house where my favorite flowers grew independently.  There, I would go into my special place, where small violets grew, scattered among my favorites:  the Lilies of the Valley.  They looked like little white bells and seemed to hide from the sun.  I had a sun allergy, and was happy to be with them in the shaded area nestled next to the house.  There were so many of them!  I remember kneeling there, a pig-tailed little girl, inhaling their lovely fragrance and enjoying them bobbing around in the summer breeze.  In my adult mind, I’ve often returned to that peaceful place with my favorite flowers.

 

Little did I know, as a child, how prophetic those flowers would be to my life:  The Lilies of the Valley.