Heidi Greco | Surrey, BC | LCP member for years

My family gives me prizes for my birthday

They know that I have everything
I could ever need, so now they give me flowers
in bunches, tied with ribbons.

Others by the bucketful, picked with love and scissors
scouted from the backyard in between the springtime rains.
Daffodils and lilacs, a vase of rainbowed tulips,
floppy as cottontail ears.

Some
are even store-bought. Colourful gerberas,
leggy babies slooped in plastic straws. A blooming
African violet I will surely kill by June.

I have roomfuls of bouquets: mums with green salal,
leaves for every year of joy, buds to mark the tears.
But mostly cheery blossoms – yellow, lots of orange,
sunny tones, reminders:

all that noise when they were small,
the way they brought me love back then,
furried golden dandelions, spilling
from their tiny, sweated fists.

* * *
Heidi Greco lives in Surrey, BC, where she works as a writer and editor. Her novella, Shrinking Violets, is being published by Quattro Books this spring. She is the mother of adult sons, and is currently meandering through North America on a long-anticipated road trip. Her blog is www.outonthebiglimb.blogspot.com.

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