My earliest memories of Mother’s Day involve stopping in the flower garden before we left for church. Mom would cut a blossom, most often a carnation, for each of us and pin it to our lapel. We all wore red flowers except my father. His was always white. Red, if your mother is alive, Mom would explain, and white if she is not. Her mother, my Nana, was very much alive living just up the hill from us and down the block from our church. My Gran, Dad’s mother, passed away around the time I turned five. I barely remember her and I don’t remember when my father’s blossom was red.

We lived on BC’s Sunshine Coast where flowers bloom profusely in early May. I don’t remember when we stopped keeping this very old Mother’s Day tradition, but it was likely when we moved to Vancouver where our new yard hadn’t been landscaped yet and there were no flowers growing.

Had we kept up the tradition, I would be wearing a white blossom for the first time tomorrow and the impact of that has hit me hard this past week or so. When I went into the card shops in search of birthday cards for two grandchildren who celebrated their big days recently, I was confronted with huge displays of Mother’s Day cards. Sending a card was a tradition that I continued even after Mom lost her sight and after she had difficulty remembering who I was. She could still finger the card and Dad could read its message to her. He could also gently remind her who it was from. She knew that she was loved.

This year she is gone and I have no one to send a Mother’s Day card to. Tomorrow will be a bittersweet day of remembrance. For a few moments tomorrow, in my mind at least, I’ll still be a little girl standing in a flower garden with her mother pinning a red carnation to her lapel.