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DaisyIf you find me feedin’ daisies
Please turn my face up to the sky
And leave me be
Watchin’ the moon roll by

Gordon Lightfoot
The Watchman’s Gone 

I guess most of us want to leave our mark on the world, something that people will look at and remember us for. Something tangible and worthwhile. Maybe even something beautiful.

In times gone by, before autopsies and embalming and sealed burial vaults, people passed over and were buried. They returned to the earth and fed it. Flowers were planted on the grave and took sustenance from the people below.

The circle went on.

Lately I’ve been thinking that maybe the best thing I could leave behind would be to provide sustenance to some beautiful flowers as my body returned to the earth. And then it occurred to me that my wife and I took care of this long ago.

Our three children are our wildflowers.

Their seeds were sown in loving passion, in that most ancient of rituals that mankind somehow knew before the first teachers came into our company. The seeds germinated and began to grow.

There was no sheltered flowerbed of special soil provided for them, just plain old rocky dirt that was exposed to the unpredictable weather of everyday existence. Still, they somehow grew straight and tall and vibrant and beautiful.

They aren’t clones of my wife and me, but their own variety of the basic stock they’re descended from. So very different from their beginnings, with a small part of us that you can see in all of them.

Our wildflowers.