Sweet spring

After a goofy-cold winter, I'm a little surprised to see spring leaping out at me, but as I walked back toward the house from picking up this morning's paper, I noticed a cheerful little row of white, bell-shaped blossoms peeking out from my somewhat disorderly front flowerbed.

Like a lot of other plants in my front yard, these babies have a history. The liriope and monkey grass that define my planting spaces started in the backyard of mother and daddy's best friends in Houston. The springeri fern has burgeoned from a tiny root I swiped from the first apartment I lived in after I married. Most of the amaryllises are probably great-grandchildren of the house where I grew up, and the daylilies are from one or the other of my sisters or from one of mother's cousins who brought daylilies to cheer her during the months when we knew she was dying.

These little white guys are from the backyard of the aunt who lived in town until a few years ago. Auntie's husband, my dad's brother, had been daddy's business partner when they first moved here more than six decades ago, and she lived in the only house I ever remember as hers until Margaret Joan and her husband shipped Auntie off to the nursing home a couple of years before she died.

For a couple of years before that, I tried to do the Good Samaritan thing (although that has never come as easily for me as it has my sisters) and pop in to visit Auntie from time to time. Once or twice, she needed help with yardwork, so once I mowed the lawn for her and other times I helped water or move or otherwise tend the plants that so eagerly grew on her back porch.

The little guys in question—I have no idea what they are called or where to look to find out—grew in a little clump about halfway from the back porch to the vegetable garden that had gone for years untended. Most of the time, the clump just looked like a stray clump of liriope or some grasslike kin, but in early spring, it tossed up a sprinkling of small, bell-shaped flowers with little green dots on each of its tiny "petals," if they could be called that.

When Margaret Joan moved Auntie into the nursing home, I went by the house and collected what I could of the pot plants and dug up a few ground plants that I figured would never be missed. I'm sure I could have taken the whole clump of white guys, but instead I scooped up a small clump and tossed them into the truck.

When I got them home, I planted them in a few places around my yard to see if I could find somewhere where they could grow. At Auntie's house, they sat in full, open sun; my yard doesn't understand that term. I remember putting maybe one clump in the front yard, in the sunniest spot I could find, and two or three other clumps in the back yard. They managed to poke up in a place or two, but I don't remember much more than that.

After Soldier Son's dog Tank moved in with me a couple of years ago, I lost all hope of anything surviving anywhere in the backyard except a small flower bed that I preserved by putting a fence around it. I have a vague recollection of digging up a clump of the white guys from a flower bed I had begun around a tree that died a couple of years later. Since I didn't have much hope for blooming plants in the shady front yard, I didn't bother to remember where I might have moved it.

Apparently, I broke it down into a dozen or so little clumps in the front bed, because that's how many were sparkling up at me this morning. I was glad to see the little starscape and to smile as I remembered my diminutive Auntie with the bright green thumb.