ANALOG | Mother – Golden Wolves

Back home it’s Mother’s Day today. We don’t have a fixed date for Mother’s Day; instead, it’s the first Sunday of the month of May – which this year is actually May 1st! I wrote a card for my mum and bought her a little gift but considering the distance and how slow Royal Mail can be (we’re quite spoiled with e-mails and WeTransfer nowadays, aren’t we) she will probably only get it sometime during the week. So I decided I would make a small post dedicated to my mother.

Since Spring is only just (shakily) arriving in Brighton, some new flowers are blooming in my front yard – lilacs, tulips, geraniums. I’m that person who squints at all the girls who take pictures of flowers with their phones and immediately call themselves “photographers”, so to avoid being thrown into that cliché I tend to stay away from taking photos of flowers altogether. But when I saw such vibrant colours for the first time in the 8 months I’ve been here, I couldn’t resist.

You see, my mother’s most favourite things in the world are dogs, travelling, history and flowers. You can’t tell right away, considering she works as a doctor (GP) and has a very pragmatic attitude. If you go to her Instagram, however, her love for life really shines through.

My mother’s favourite flowers are orchids and roses, but not the typical red rose. She has a small collection of orchids and a large garden of roses she carefully tends to. I can tell easily that my mother is going through an emotionally rough time when the roses in our garden look withered and weak and the orchids are small and limply bending forward. Gardening requires a lot of passion and energy. My mother’s love of plants came from my grandfather, and after he passed away her collection of English roses – handpicked and ordered from private rose centres in the UK and affectionally planted in terracotta pots – never really recovered.

Mum would write the names and species of all the roses on tabs and stick them in the earth, like collectors or florists do. Each rose was different. When my dog was little we had to make sure the tabs were hidden from sight because he liked pulling them out of the soil and chewing on them.

My mother is a complex, layered individual but I’ve always admired her generosity and intelligence. She is always willing to help everyone, from family members to strangers, and never asks for anything in return. She has an amazing sense of humour and can find the fun in any situation, sometimes making me laugh at my own problems.

I can only hope that blood runs in my veins.