Tiny Blossoms © 2010 Bo Mackison
Flowers from a patch of chives.
When I was a young child, I lived in a house full of grandparents — grandmother and grandfather and my grandmother’s mother. My great-grandmother’s name was Prudie and I remember her most vividly when I was about 7 or 8 and she was in her 80s. I was an only child for much of my childhood, and lived in an apartment building where there were no other children, so Prudie was my best friend.
In the “flowering” months – usually March through November – my grandfather, Prudie’s son-in-law, would spend many hours every day in his gardens. Every morning he picked a single fresh flower and brought it to Prudie’s second floor bedroom. Knocked on her door, exchanged “good mornings” and he’d give her a flower.
Prudie had two cut glass vases – one large, one small. Some mornings she would receive a flower fit for the larger vase – a luscious ‘Everlasting’ red rose or a frilly white peony. But often she would get a tiny token from the yard – a deep purple pansy, a stalk of lily of the valley, sometimes an inauspicious white clover or a blossom from the purple chives.
These chive blossoms, desaturated to remove much of the color, remind me of the single chive flower I would occasionally see in my grandmother’s room. She kept the room quite dark to help stave off the heat and protect her weakened eyes from bright lights, and the brown shades, when pulled nearly closed, lit the room in tones rather like those seen in the photograph.
