Freedom Flower

To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility

Emily Dickinson

I sit at the dining room table, appetite waning, mesmerized by a single yellow lily. Symmetrical petals, stamen reminiscent of the loving eyes of my late grandmother, Elfrieda.

On the arm of my reading chair rests a literary touchstone of my childhood, My Mother is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

On the cover, peasants dance in colorful, flowing clothes with embroidered, bell-jar sleeves. The men wear boots with turned up toes; the women, woven sandals under wide skirts, flower wreaths on their heads, flowing ribbons in their hair.

Once upon a time, long, long, ago, when the harvest season had come again in Ukraine, the villagers were all busy cutting and gathering the wheat. For this is the land from which most Russians get the flour for their bread.

I can’t imagine much flour from Ukraine these days, as her people stand their ground, holding one fifth of the world’s calories against relentless obliteration.

I think of Elfrieda, at sixteen sent alone by her mother across the Atlantic from Latvia, one of three Baltic states north of Ukraine.

My grandmother grew up under the thumb of the Russian Empire. She did not question Ronald Reagan’s mutuallyassured destruction policy on nuclear weapons. During the Gulf War, she greeted a headline with a newspaper-quaking flourish. “George BOOSH” she announced, “is fighting for our FREEEEDOM.” An anti-war, International Relations minor, I shuddered at her simplified stance on a complicated crisis. A generation later, on the edge of a third world war, I get where she was coming from. And I wonder if our president should heed the Ukrainian president’s plea to truly “lead the world.”

After raising six children as a single mother in the forests of the Adirondacks, Elfrieda began painting evocative sunsets, crisp mountain lakes, and bright flowers. She spent long summer hours in her beloved garden, tending lilies.

On my way back from a college year in Europe, I stayed with my grandmother for Christmas. She called me a beautiful, blooming flower. One day I was a rose. The next a morning glory.

On NPR, the voices of women artists in Ukrainian bomb shelters speak to me in my kitchen. Inspired by a video of a woman offering seeds to invading soldiers, one artist paints the skulls of Russian troops as the roots of sunflowers, the unwavering national flower of Ukraine. Another sketches mothers holding children to their chests, surrounded by liminal images reaching for the sky. “Somehow,” she says, “we must find ways to bring our attention to ‘those tiny sun lights.’"

Christine Beck