My mother loved flowers. Not that she gardened or kept houseplants in sunny windows. That wasn’t her thing. But if you gave her a bouquet or even a wilting dandelion presented from the sticky paws of a child, she’d smile and appreciate the gift. How many water glasses filled with weeds and flowers from yards in the neighborhood did my mother lovingly display on her kitchen table? Season upon season, decade upon decade.
As a child, our family home was located at 9 Longwood Avenue, the corner of Longwood Avenue and Ninth Street in the heart of the former Victorian village – Onset. By the time we lived there, a great deal of the area’s former glory as a summertime colony for the upwardly mobile was already fading from shabby chic to just shabby. But for me, the filter in my mind, was one of adventure filled with old New England coastal beauty full of summertime highs and winter lulls.
Once schools closed for the summer, carloads of returning families would fill up the cottages, and the sounds of summer played in the background of my days. I’d have the summer kids to play with until the mosquitos chased us inside each evening. Summer foods, watermelon, juicy ripe tomatoes, grapes and melon, ice cream and pizza. Things we take for granted today were seasonal delights in the 1950s. I loved it all and remember it well.
During the school year when all the “summer people” who owned these second homes were hunkered down in Boston and in suburbs where their children attended private schools and played organized sports, worshiped in cathedrals and spent winter vacations skiing in Vermont or sunning themselves in Florida, I was sledding on the bluffs that buttressed Onset beach or rode my bike up and down the empty village streets, fantasizing about life within those cottage walls.
Yet one season above all others remains my favorite, and that is spring. The silence of a spring afternoon in the village was a balm from generational cares and concerns that seeped into my revery. Spring meant that yards I peddled by would soon be filled with flowers. My world both imagined and real would be joyfully colored with blooms, if only for a few weeks.
The cottages’ tiny, landscaped lots were abandoned in the offseason. The summer people who filled Onset to overflowing in the summer were primarily first-generation, white-collar folks who had done well owning a shop or business and in keeping with the post-WWII boom years were ready to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But rarely if ever did these folks with their second homes in my empire spend more than June, July and August in Onset. In spring, I became a thief seeking out floral plunder in yards with white picket fences.
Spring flowers popped open in profuse abundance from forgotten gardens. Every shade of yellow and white filled flowering beds with daffodils. Wild purple pansies skirted the elegant spears of the daffodils like petticoats. Soon the harvesting would begin.
Of course, I had always been told to stay off other people’s property. Of course, I knew it was wrong to take that which was not mine. But so strong was the urge to steal, the urge to bring armloads of flowers home to my mother, I succumbed. I needed the reward of her poorly concealed smiles.
The adrenaline rush of stealing is very real for the natural-born thief. First, you have to case the area where the crime will take place, then you have to make sure you have the ability to grab what you want and carry it off to your lair, then you have to hide your ill-gotten gains so no one finds out. Well, that last part didn’t apply to my thievery. I wanted these treasures on full display in my mother’s kitchen.
My methods were crude: Grab a handful as much as a six-year-old’s hand could hold and pull with all my might. The stems and roots put up a good fight.
Mission accomplished, I’d hasten home through backyards so as not to be spied by an infrequent car passing by. Bounding up the back kitchen steps breathless and exuberant, I’d call to my mother. Upon seeing me standing there with a mitt full of daffodils, she’d try to hide her smile. What came out of her mouth was something along the lines of, “Oh no, I told you to stop stealing flowers. You are going to get caught, and I won’t help you!”
As she took the flowers from my wet hands, she’d fill a water glass and place the bent and mostly broken daffodils on the kitchen table beside a half-dozen others she’d been gifted by the Daffodil Thief. As she returned to her cigarettes and soap operas, she’d give me a little squeeze around my shoulders. All was well with my thieving soul.
This Mattapoisett Life
By Marilou Newell