It’s awkwardly pleasant day. As the rain lightly falls on the yellowed winter grass. I reminisce in my mind the many times my mother would purposefully include me on her venture to go “antiquing”. As a teenager, i hated most of the places she would drag me to. I often asked her, “Mom this is so boring” I’d say in a bratty, snarky way. She would keep driving what would feel like an eternity until we eventually got to one of her many favorite destinations. “Deb, look at all the beautiful flowers growing wild along the side of the road. Sometimes it’s just the littlest things that make the entire journey special.”

I would cringe each and every time she said that, why? Because it meant she was going to pull to the side of this long boring country road, and make me get out of the car with her to teach me about flowers. I was never one who enjoyed school and having a mother who was also a teacher was simply annoying I thought as a child. Every opportunity in her mind, was an opportunity to teach and an opportunity for me, to possibly learn something.

She gradually put her blinker on and proceeded to pull over carefully as to not accidentally go to far and end up in a ditch. And i wondered if she knew that i still had to get out of the car with her on that side of the road which without fail, the first step i had to take was always a couple inches of that said ditch.

“Mom, why don’t you ever take the highway like normal people because ya know we would get there a lot faster?” I asked that day. She gently informed me that, “because driving on those toll roads, you would miss all this natural beauty around you now. Do you know what these are called?” She asked, “no mother” I proclaimed, trying my hardest not to fall backwards into the 2 foot ditch covered with wet green grass and these tall things that were strange and always made me sneeze. And at that delicate age, i could care less what those ugly, itchy flowers were. “These are called Goldenrods. Do you know why they are called that Debs?” Again, I was annoyed and didn’t pay any attention to her wildflower school lesson. I was hungry and bored but answered her anyway in hopes we could get there and find a Dairy Queen, “Ya Mom because they are yellow.” Mom smiled as if she had just taught me the entire wildflower section of the encyclopedia britannica on the side of the road! “That is right! Do you know how smart you are?” She would say to me. And after that we would continue along her journey to find the perfect little antique store in a quaint boring town, with boring people but somehow she always knew where in that same town, there was a Dairy Queen!

It wasn’t until i was well into my 40’s that i discovered perhaps one of two reasons my mother always took us on the back roads of Maine in search of her next antique acquisition. In fact she told me now that I was an adult that she in fact didn’t like the toll roads because the cars go too fast and it’s scary to merge onto the highway. But mostly it was because that day in my 40’s as we drove along the back road to Wiscasset, Maine to what had now become one of my own favorite and most cherished places.

I yelled trying not to scare her as she may not have been the best driver, “Oh my Mom, look at all those beautiful Godenrods! Can we please stop and pick some on the way back to your house?” She smiled as she glanced over at me as “Notebook for Anna” from Bach symphony played in the background and Mom not get to distracted by her truest joy to be fulfilled, that her daughter had never forgotten the names of those wildflowers along those picturesque, once boring, lesson filled, mid morning, Saturday drives

Fast forward now in my 50’s and no longer share this earth with my beautiful wise Mother, I wonder to myself if she truly understood that she was teaching me a far more valuable lesson than simply names of the wildflowers. “Of course she did”, I exclaimed to myself, after all she was the wisest woman I will have ever known in all of my entire life, and I had the honor to call her My Mother 💗