Life can be awkward. Some of us don’t achieve certain milestones – be they physical, emotional, or spiritual – at the same time as others. We can be over or under-shaped. We can be slow in achievement, whether that be in ability, insight, or character. We can feel impoverished from the perspective of vocation, identity, or purpose.
If you have experienced a sense of tardiness in life, a feeling that somehow you either didn’t receive or have lost an invitation to some or most of life’s opportunities and wonders, don’t worry – there are many seasonal cycles for arrival. In fact, not only can blooming occur later in life, sometimes the most striking blossoms happen well past expected ages and phases. Take, for example, my Aunt Daisy.
She’s still blooming twenty years after her death.
Strictly speaking, Daisy was my dad’s aunt, not mine. And Daisy wasn’t her name by birth. That didn’t matter. Everyone in the extended family called her Aunt Daisy.
Even as a child, I saw her as old. As she was born in 1914, forty-five years before me, I guess she was. But Aunt Daisy didn’t act old. A faint odor of mothballs in the house where she and her sisters lived? Yep. I would forget it quickly though, because she would watch me, closely, her eyes soft with support yet lively with intrigue. I could be sitting off to a side, saying nothing, trying not to be noticed, and still those eyes would find mine. She seemed to see things. She seemed to know things about me, without asking.
I was not an early bloomer. While I may have been good in school, I was a bit clumsy otherwise. Shorter than my friends, ears larger than theirs, hair cut so short that a phrenologist would not have needed to touch my skull to know its shape, I was not exactly a picture of fulfillment. There was always some type of healing scrape on my forehead. There was probably a look of impatient spirit inside a clumsy child’s body.
Maybe that’s why she liked me. I was a racing mind inside an inelegant form. Aunt Daisy watched me as if she understood.
It’s possible she made everyone feel that way. It’s also possible that she identified with my disquiet. From what I’ve seen in photos, she may have encountered similar self-consciousness in her youth.
I don’t really know that much about her. One of nine children, Aunt Daisy’s childhood was somewhat topsy-turvy. She was born during the first world war. Her family did well financially in the 1920s, only to lose that material wealth during the Great Depression. She never married. She was very active in her church. She and two of her sisters lived together their entire lives, caring first for their parents (my great-grandparents) in their advanced years and then for each other. There was always a sense of simplicity in their lives.
There was also a sense of postponement, deferment.
At least that’s how I recall judging things, after I’d let my hair grow long enough to cover my forehead and ears. Aunt Daisy gave her life to her family, to her church, and to God. She had a mind that might have accomplished many things on this earth. But that ability had not been nourished in twentieth century sunlight. Her bloom during her life had been understated.
Ah, so that judgmental bloom of my own had thought.
Because there she is, her photo leaning against the lamp on my night stand, behind the prayer card from her 1998 funeral service. I don’t recall when and how I came upon either the photo or prayer card. They just found me. They then found their way onto the night stand. I look at them every day. I wonder what it is I really understand about life’s timing and the roles we each play.
I remember the last thing my mom said to me, before my mom died. It was a Sunday. We were having one of our regular long distance weekend phone calls. It was twelve years after Aunt Daisy had died but somehow Daisy came up in the conversation. She had told my mom that she would send her a sign, after she died.
I was instantly curious. “Really? And did she?”
“Oh yes,” my mom replied.
“And?”
“She – “, my mom stopped, distracted by something in the background. “I’m sorry but your dad needs me for something,” she said. “I’ll call you back in a bit.”
I never did get that call back, didn’t hear from my mom what Aunt Daisy’s sign to her had been. Maybe it’s coming through now, years later. Maybe it has something to do with the nature of how we may bloom.
It’s never too late. Perhaps those types of blooms are the most spectacular.