On Blue Wings

My mom passed away four years ago, and there still isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t talk to her—or to my dad, who has been gone much longer.

But there is one part of my day when I feel especially close to my mom.

Every morning, I step outside Colorado Mountain Distillers and water the flower baskets hanging on the front porch. They’re overflowing with deep purple petunias, other little purple blooms, and long green vines that spill over the edges. I water them, pick away the spent flowers, straighten the vines, and fuss over them probably more than I need to.

And every single time, I think of her.

Flowers were my mom’s gift. She had the kind of green thumb that made everything around her beautiful. Some of my earliest memories are of the flowers she grew when I was a little girl. I didn’t realize then that all those years of watching her tend them would someday become one of the ways I would feel closest to her after she was gone.

There is something peaceful about standing there in the morning with my hands in the flowers. For a few minutes, the rest of the world gets quiet. I’m not thinking about work or what needs to be done next. I’m simply tending something beautiful the way she taught me to.

And then there is the bluebird.

Mountain bluebirds started appearing daily… one appears nearly every day, and every time I see that flash of blue, I feel her.

Maybe some people would call it coincidence. Maybe others would call it a sign.

I just call it Mom.

Four years later, I still miss her terribly. I suppose I always will. But I’ve also learned that the people we love don’t simply disappear from our lives. Sometimes we find them in the things they taught us, in the rituals we carry forward, in a flower we carefully deadhead on a summer morning.

And sometimes, if we’re lucky, they arrive on blue wings.