For the new additions to the email list, this is my first Encore Email. I wrote this a year ago and it explains the lilac comment on my last email. In recognition of Mother's day, I am sending it out again tonight with a special smile to my mother, who took this very sensitive little boy and pointed him in the right direction with love and patience. So if you are reading this and raising a sensitive child, know that with your support he can become a big bald veterinarian that cries easily.
Maybe that isn't coming out as encouraging as I meant it.
anyway...here is the email......
PS...thanks for saving it Valerie, Debbie, Angie, Rebecca, Sarah and Nicole.
Please feel free to stop by the clinic anytime and pick lilacs from the enormous bushes behind the clinic, or lupines in a week or two from the field.
Today I was reminded of how beautiful the lilacs are while taking part in an annual family tradition. Each year since I was young, I have trimmed lilacs for my mother on or around Mother's Day. The family story goes like this....my mother grew up in Munich Germany immediately after World War II. She lived in a tiny apartment in an area that had been greatly affected by the war. Food was difficult to get regularly, and unexploded bombs claimed the lives of some even after the war ended. My grandmother (Omi) kept the family fed by procuring what food she could find. By my mother's description, she was a stout, resilient woman who wanted little but the survival of her family. One of her delights was when my mother would bring her lilacs in the spring. My mother had memories of stealing lilacs from nearby neighborhoods and bringing them to her smiling mother.
As a young boy, I focused mainly on this stealing part, and as part of the mother's day ritual, I would dress up to camoflage myself and steal our neighbor's lilacs in suburban Maryland (and I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr and Mrs Williams). As I moved onto college and eventually to Vet school, it was harder to get the lilacs to my mother, although I did later take photographs of lilacs and sent her lilac soap. When I moved to Maine in 1992, I noticed that the lilacs came later, and when my mother moved up here, we moved the tradition from Mother's day to Memorial day.
I admit that one of the things that drew me to the property that Kindred Spirits now stands on is the two enormous lilac bushes in the back of the building. In my list of advantages of this site, I had the simple word "Lilacs"
So today we had a cookout with my mother and I left a bit early to procure the lilacs. It was on a list of things to do that I must admit has been a bit long lately. With the growth of the clinic, a family and community, I feel like I am working hard to make a difference, but I do sometimes get overwhelmed by the number of things that are necessary for all of those things to happen. Perhaps whiney would be a better word than overwhelmed here.
As I drove with the windows up and the beautiful fragrance of the lilacs though, I was struck by something else. The genesis of this tradition started in post war Germany where my grandmother sifted through rubble and my mother was hardly guaranteed to have her next meal. Just a few years before, bombs had been dropping and buildings of stone as well as families were reduced to rubble. Suddenly the lilac became much more of a sign of optimism . The beauty of a flower that had made it through a war, still as fragrant as before, must have been a powerful reminder of the resilience of a culture.
Humbling trip all in all.
So I just trimmed a bunch of lilacs and put them all over the clinic. The staff is gonna wonder what the heck I'm up to tomorrow morning. But there are still a ton left, and I invite you to come over and "steal" them. They are a reminder for me this week to never whine about my to do list.
Have a great week!
Smell the lilacs.
Mark
PS...OK, so you can have the lilacs and the lupines, but keep your crummy mitts off the Asiatic Lillies!
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