A Place Where Flowers Grow

Of Maggie—our joyful, curious, unhurried six-year-old—on her golden birthday

One weekend this winter, Middle Tennessee endured its worst ice storm in over 30 years. Snow began to fall on a Saturday morning, and it would give way to ice by the mid-afternoon that day. My daughter Maggie and I spent part of that Saturday morning working a big puzzle in the shape of a rooster while sitting at the dining room table. Daisy, our two-year-old, played with mommy “uppy-stairs.”

Maggie is a puzzle pro, and because of my pretty severe colorblindness, I am definitively not a puzzle pro, so Maggie patiently lets me help her work puzzles. Usually I’m tasked with getting all of the edge pieces together to make the frame, but this puzzle has no such pieces given that it is in the shape of a literal rooster. Because of this, I felt particularly helpless on this puzzle.

We sat and talked and puzzled at the kitchen table for a while as the snow began to fall, and by the time we had finished probably two-thirds of the giant rooster, Daisy called from the uppy-stairs:

“Maggie! Come uppy-stairs and pay wif me!?”

Maggie called back something like,

“No, Sissy. I’m doing a puzzle with daddy right now!”

Then Maggie turned to me, and said,

“I’m having fun with you, and that’s all I care about right now.”

Maggie can struggle to stay on task at school sometimes, especially if reading a story brings to mind a story of her own she wants to share. But when she spends quality time with people she loves, she is relentlessly present. She gets this from her mother more than anyone else.

May I learn from her even as I do what I can to help her learn.

—

Many days, when it’s nice outside, our family will spend the afternoon hours after Maggie gets home from school and before dinner playing out in our front yard or on our driveway. Often we’re riding bikes, scooters, or maneuvering the other toy vehicles that take up one bay of our two-car garage. Sometimes we’re playing kickball or hitting a tennis ball back-and-forth.

A few weeks ago, some flowers and trees had just begun to bloom and violets were poking up through the barely-alive grass and other assorted weeds. Our family pickup kickball game was abruptly paused when Maggie began picking the violets out of the grass and collecting them in a bug net—Daisy, as always, followed closely behind.

At one point, Maggie shouted toward Susie and me, as we were sitting in the garage watching them pluck, and said:

“Mama, we’re so lucky to live in a place where flowers grow!”

Most of us live in places where flowers grow. And I suspect that, unless we are passionate gardeners, most of us aren’t stopping to smell or otherwise enjoy the flowers around us very much. Certainly most of us mow over the violets that crop up in the middle of our grass along with whatever other kinds of weeds invade.

What I love most, I think, about Magnolia is her unmatched ability to fully and completely enjoy everything about the world around her. She is often unconcerned with where she needs to be going. She is rarely in any sort of rush. She is constantly taking in her surroundings, curiously examining every sight, sound, and smell, and either enjoying what she loves or asking questions about what she doesn’t understand.

Now, does this make her difficult to teach sometimes? Yes, we hear that it does. Does it also make her difficult to parent sometimes? Absolutely. And we are doing all we can to give Maggie a bit more urgency and discipline without suffocating her curiosity and appreciation of every last bit of her world.

I think it’s fair to say that all of us have some remarkable qualities that inevitably come with some costs we wish we could eliminate but that are inseparable from whatever it is that makes us remarkable. Growing in discipline requires us to embrace the beautiful parts of who God has made us to be while also recognizing we live in a world with other people we are called to consider more important than ourselves.

That said, I’ll take being late from time-to-time if it means I can move about my world with a heart that is grateful to live in a place where flowers grow. And as a restless, tired, father of two little girls who just happened to both be named after flowers, I would do well to stop and be a bit more appreciative to live in a place where flowers grow.

Happy golden birthday, Maggie. I am so grateful you are one of the flowers I get to watch grow.