=) Mother’s Day (=

Presently jammed into my little corner of the couch, pretending to be sick.

When you’re sick, you have permission to disengage; you don’t even have to see construction dust.  But I’ll explain all that later.  For now, I have a Mother’s Day story to tell.  It is not my story.  It’s Cam’s.  But you can bet he isn’t going to write it down, so I am going to.

Now, look at that sweet face.  What a good guy.  Despite the fact that he’s jammed with project deadlines, regardless of the fact that the house deal finally went through and he’s got to get the place ready to move into (another LONG story)—in the face of shooting Kyle’s wedding (on his mother’s birthday – that would be MY birthday, not Kyle’s mother’s birthday)—this handsome young daddy remembered to buy Mother’s Day flowers.  Not just flowers for his L.  (Roses for her)  But flowers for his own Mommy—and for his mother-in-law.

Pretty dang good, right? So he and I spend pretty much all morning into the afternoon shooting the wedding.  Then he drives back down the valley, while I run all over, far west to way east, running Gin’s Mother’s Day errands and managing to get thoroughly lost in the process.

I finally haul myself home just in time to change clothes before Cam and I have to turn around and go back up valley for the reception.  So G and I decide to cut down on time by driving over to meet Cam at his house. So far, frantic but good.  Lorri is there.  But Cam isn’t home.  Yet.  He’s off running his own errands.  But no—he’s actually in the garage, back from his errands. Busily doing something.  Stashing flowers, in fact.

He’d come home with these three huge bouquets and had just been getting them out of the car when Lor’s mom pulled up in front of the house.  And then we drove up.  So he grabbed the flowers and booked it into the garage, frantically looking for a hiding place. He found the perfect one. The FREEZER.  Of course, the freezer.

Later, he will say to me, “The freezer isn’t going to hurt flowers that have been in there two minutes.”  Which is true.

So he finishes stashing, comes into the house, greets everybody and runs to change his clothes, because by now we are late.  Late wedding photographers.

Once he is dressed, C and L and I throw ourselves into the car and head up north to shoot the bride’s maids and groom’s men. Cam drives fast.  Really fast.

We’re up at the reception for about two, three hours.  And it’s not until after that, he remembers the flowers, which are still in the freezer.  So while Lorri is changing out of her fancy clothes, Cam is scrambling around, trying to save the frozen bouquets.

He can’t find any vases.  Of course he can’t—everything they own is packed up to move.  So he finds this bucket.  Nice big bucket.  And he sticks all the frozen but still beautiful flowers in there and shoves the whole thing behind a mattress over against the far wall of the garage.

“The last thing we had in that bucket was the bleach solution you were using to clean the tile,” Lorri later points out. Yeah.  Bleach.

So Mother’s Day dawns, and he goes to check on the flowers.  He peers into the cave behind the mattress and finds that the flowers have turned over night into something like brown rubber. But he puts a brave face on it and presents Lorri with what’s left of her roses.  And she is dear enough to appreciate the thought, but not dear enough by half not to laugh her head off.

He says there’s no use taking the flowers to me—mine didn’t even do as well as the roses had—and is about to toss them, when Lorri tells him that his mother will surely understand.  So—what the heck.

They pack Scooter up after church and head to our house.  Cam’s carrying Scooter, the diaper bag and the flowers.  He gets to the car, unlocks it, and is trying to figure out how to get everything (everybody?) in the car, when a wasp comes up.  One of those persistent, spring yellow-jacket queens that buzz in your face and won’t go away.

He stows Scooter in his seat and starts to beat at the wasp—with the flowers. The wasp decamps.  But Cam still has the flowers and the bag in his hands, and Scooter, bouncing around the inside of the car.  So he puts the flowers on the roof of the car while he stows the bag and straps Scooter into his seat.

Then they’re all in  the car, driving away.  And it’s not till they’re unloading at my house that he misses the flowers.  So they get back into the car, retrace their tire tracks, and find the flowers in the street, just at the end of their driveway. (slip into past tense)

It didn’t take long to get back to my house.  And that’s where I was presented with the flowers.  And the story.

As far as Scoots is concerned, it’s all good.

And this explains why I made a header out of dead flowers.

Because, of course, I loved them.