by Kelly Blaine, Founding Partner and President, Fjor Films
February 8th. That’s the first day I saw my favorite flower, a jonquil, in bloom this year. The first sighting always makes my heart skip a beat and I find myself breathing deeper, longer, and easier. As much as I enjoy what the blooming flowers usher in, I enjoy what they symbolize to me much more. Every spring growing up there would be a knock at the door. My mother would open it and my father would be standing there with his hand behind his back with a bouquet of the first jonquils of spring that he had stopped and picked on the side of the road for my mother, his sweetheart.
As a little girl I just thought it was nice to have pretty flowers in the house. As I grew older I began to appreciate that he was doing something sweet for my mother. And as the years have passed I have grown to appreciate the profound beauty in an act so simple and all that it represents. Is it any wonder that the bloom of the jonquils in the spring evoke feelings of warmth, happiness, and peace in me?
Throughout the years there were other quiet tokens of affection that would randomly appear, like a letter in the mail (mailed from his office) for her that would read, “I love you. Do you love me? Mark Yes or No.” And there would be drawn on the paper two little boxes, one for “yes,” one for “no.” These “little” gifts ultimately represented to me the best gifts in the world. Often costing nothing, or at most a stamp, they were heartfelt, and watching from the sidelines my heart felt!
It has been said that the greatest gift a father can give his children is to love their mother. And so it has been for me. The love my father showed my mother, and continues to show her, teaches me more than I think he could ever realize. And the love she reciprocates is just as divine.
Several years ago, after a brutal night of recovering from surgery, I awoke to find a glass of jonquils sitting next to my bedside that my own sweetheart had stopped and picked for me on his way home from taking our daughter to school. Last week I found a vase of jonquils in the kitchen that my children had stopped, picked, and brought home. Every few days I find fresh ones in the vase. Like the jonquils that return every spring, multiplying as they do, what they represent has multiplied in my own life, and as evidenced in the actions of my husband and children who know they are my favorite and why, it is regenerating and multiplying in new generations, too.
Sometimes the answers to simple questions like “what is your favorite color,” or “what is your favorite flower” are just as simple as the questions themselves. But on occasion they hold the secrets to the best lessons to be modeled in life, affecting and connecting generations. So here’s to the asking, to the discovering, to the connecting and the passing down. And who knows, you may find your heart skipping a beat at the first flowers to bloom on the side of the road in the spring.
