Wednesday Wisdom #8 - Mums

Here in the midwest it is Autumn! The leaves are falling, the rains are steady, and the mums are omnipresent. I usually buy heirloom mums from 3 Porch Farm but this year we will be out of town for much of October so I did not plant this year and I am missing them!

This year’s schedule is oddly reflective of last year’s, when my daughter was born three-months premature while we were vacationing in Eastern Ohio and we also ended up out of town for all of October (and November and December and January).

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day I went into labor. I spent the evening baking apple pie and hosting a dinner party with Marc. But as the night wore on, something just wasn’t right. We drove through the rain and fog and construction to Wexner Medical Center, where our daughter Hazel was born the following day.

The first time I held my daughter Hazel, four days after she was born three-months premature. She weighed 2 pounds.

My mother drove to my house in Oxford to pick up some things for me to have at the little apartment that we rented near the hospital, and one of the things that I asked for was my mums. You can see them in the image of our back door below.

Last year's wild mums from 3 Porch Farm.

You are supposed to cut them regularly but I let them grow wild across the doorway. I liked how as they grew you had to contort your body to avoid the blooms as you passed, like little sentinels standing guard.

Heirloom mums come in an outrageous variety of shapes and colors, many of which look like aliens. They are perfect for Autumn, the season when we celebrate Halloween and the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). In Chinese Medicine, Autumn is the season of metal, the element connected to our experience of grief and connection and loss.

The thing that is remarkable about mums is that they continue growing even as the temperature drops below what other flowers can handle. They are hardy and stand up to the moody weather of the season.

When our own conditions seem less than ideal, mums encourage us to consider the possibility that when others might wither, we can thrive.

Less fear, more flow,

Ann