09/23/2026
David tells about things remembered and lost.
When my late wife, Sylvia, and I moved into the house I’m still in, we brought with us not only our furniture and other things from inside the old house, but some outdoor plants and flowers – even a shrub. The shrub, of course, was small: a young mock orange. Sylvia had a thing about mock oranges, so we dug it up and took it with us to the new house. Then there were irises that we inherited from the previous owners of our first house. I can still recall Sylvia doting over those irises when we moved there in 1971. They were very different varieties from those she was familiar with. I liked them, too. I also remember a rose bush. Well, everyone likes roses. Appropriately, it was red. So, the irises, along with the mock orange and the rose bush were transplanted to the new yard. That was in the summer of 1976.
For reasons that I cannot explain, when it came to plants and such, there was a sort of division-of-plant-labor between us. I took care of all the indoor plants and Sylvia did the outdoor ones. This meant that she only worked during the relatively short span from late spring to early fall, since we live in Winnipeg, Canada. Whereas, I looked over the house plants all year long.
Actually, I can explain something. You may have noticed that when speaking of digging up things I use the plural. This was because Sylvia enjoyed physically working in the yard. This digging urge she acquired in the year after High School that she spent working on a Kibbutz in Israel. It was daily hard physical labor in the field: digging, planting, pruning, picking and so forth. Yet she always talked about it lovingly. That was 1960-61 and I saw the blissful look on her face when working in our yard, from 1971 onward.
In time we had a diverse array of plants and flowers. In no particular order, we had lilacs, peonies, hostas, lilies, day-lilies, irises, roses, tulips, lungwort, elephant ears, clematis, rhubarb and the mock orange (which – along with the irises and roses – had grown quite nicely, since the summer of 1976).
All this lasted until the foremost transition in our lives. Early in 2014 Sylvia was diagnosed as being in an early stage of dementia.
Continue reading here: https://kindovermatter.com/what-i-miss-2/
