White Gardenias

by Linda Puffenberger

White gardenias were my mother’s favorite flower. It’s an old-fashioned aromatic flower with an intoxicating fragrance — one that Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, would be proud of. One could even go so far as to imagine the gates of Heaven lined with pure white gardenia bushes. And I could image my mother tending to them, as she so often did in life.

In Ohio, every spring I would always buy a gardenia plant to remember my mother by. I would nurture it along as if it were a newborn. Then amazingly every year, on June 13th (my mother’s birthday) a cherished gift would arrive for me — one silky-white gardenia delicately unfolding amid glossy green leaves. Only one. Other times in my life, if I would be down, suddenly a gardenia would appear to cheer me up. It’s as if my mother plucked it from her heavenly garden, planted it in my garden at the exact time when I needed it the most.

When I moved to Florida, I was thrilled to discover two white gardenia bushes planted in the front of our house. The day the moving van arrived, I was an emotional wreck. Thoughts like, did we make the right decision to move to Florida? flooded my brain. Then low and behold, I noticed one white gardenia blooming as the movers carried the furniture in. I chuckled to myself and have never doubted that decision again.

Last November, my sister passed away. She too had Mom’s love for gardenias. Wrought with sadness, a day after we had returned from Ohio and the funeral, I was on my way out to the mailbox when I spotted not one but two beautiful wedding-white blossoms. My heavy heart felt soothed as my eyes scanned the heavens, imagining beyond the white clouds, that my sister was gardening with Mom.