If you are driving through Montana in the springtime and see poppies growing by the side of the road – vivid, yellow-orange globes of color looking out of place, like they belong on a California hillside instead of Montana, you can thank my Mom.
She tossed California Golden Poppy seeds out the window, as our family trek across country yet another time, like dustbowl migrants, all our stuff in our car. But we were not wandering, searching for a better life. We were under orders.
A faceless military bureaucrat decided our next duty station. We knew it would never be Kansas because my dad was in the U.S. Navy. They don’t have aircraft carriers and naval bases in Kansas. Even as a little kid, I knew that.
So we traversed this great country, going from one coast to another, leaving friends, starting over, moving to a new naval base, a new school, a new life, and we did it about every nine months.
Mom was an equal opportunity seed thrower. It didn’t matter if my Dad took the northern route through Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota or the middle way, winding through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas or take the southern route through Arizona, New Mexico and the huge state of Texas that never seemed to end.
Between towns, in the middle of nowhere, Mom would reach into her purse, pull out a packet of seeds, rip off one corner and shake out some tiny black seeds in her cupped hand. Then shed roll the window down all the way, scan the right of way and fling the seeds with a full sweep of her arm.
Dad never said anything, just kept driving. I’m sure he resented this sudden invasion of hot air into the cool car. She would keep flinging, a few at a time, until the packet was empty.
The deed done, Mom rolled up the window, put the packet back in her purse, and sit very quietly, staring straight ahead, arms folded. She seemed to be meditating.
Five hundred years from now, archeological sifting through the ancient ruins of roadsides will be hard pressed to explain California Golden Poppies growing in Mississippi and Montana. They’ll come up with elaborate wind patterns and scattering theories, but you and I know the truth. It was my Mom.
As a kid in the back seat, surrounded by all the things provided to keep us happy and quiet -books, crayons, paper, puzzles, small boxes of breakfast cereal, I thought Mom was really cool, throwing seeds out the window. I decided she must be related to Johnnie Appleseed, who planted apple trees all over America, and that made me proud, like I’d acquired a really neat relative I could brag about.
Years later Jacqueline Kennedy visiting California. Her husband Jack Kennedy was then President. It was springtime. Brown hills were wearing their finery, a Jacob’s coat of many colors – including California Golden poppies and purple lupine.
She admired the color on the hills and later asked for poppy and lupine seeds to be sent to the White House. I knew right then and there that my Mom and Mrs. Kennedy would have gotten along famously. Surly they’d have tea, talk about flowers and making wherever they lived beautiful.
But I wonder if Mom also had another agenda. Perhaps the poppies, in addition to being beautiful, were like breadcrumbs, marking the trail, showing her the way back to California, showing her the way home.
You see, Mom was a California girl, full of sunshine and surf, loving the Pacific Ocean, the tides, and the rhythms of the days. How tough it must have been for her to marry a military man and move around like a nomad, never owning a home, rootless, renting, setting up households in faraway places where people had regional accents and different expectations and there wasn’t a lupine or poppy to be found.
To compensate, Mom planted flowers, sometimes randomly, by flinging seeds out of a car window. She created springtime wherever she went.
I look outside today at spring unfolding in my back yard, Easter about to happen, trees growing tall that I planted and I realize I’m not the little girl in the backseat anymore.
It is my turn to be in the front seat. I have roots some 3000 miles from California but, to my surprise, I sometimes have this irresistible urge to throw poppy seeds in my backyard and out the car window while driving down the road.
I am, even after all these years, my Mother’s daughter.
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For further reading:
http://www.calphoto.com/wflower.htm has a California wildflower hotsheet where people post sightings of wildflowers.
http://www.californiapictures.com/californiawildflowers1c.html has lovely photos of California Golden Poppy, the state flower
“Home” by Illustrator Jeannie Baker, a wordless book for ages 4to 8 about a young girl living on a bare city street and how the community takes back the street by planting flowers and trees.