Flowers

The other day, walking along the park with Ian, I pointed out flowers for the first time.

"These are flowers, Ian," I said, gently bending a hibiscus into the baby jogger so he could smell it. "It's pink."

He looked up at me. "Fow-ers."

"Right! Flowers. Let's look for them. You'll see them everywhere. Want to smell?" I demonstrated, holding the dogs by their leashes with my other hand and then holding a hibiscus to his nose. He grinned and pressed his lips together and sniffed hard and deep, tilting his head and chest back in a little heave.

"Did you smell them, Ian?"

"Yah."

We started moving again. I pointed out a cluster of rose bushes. "Here's some more flowers, Ian."

"Yah." A dog stopped to pee in a patch of ivy. Ahead of us was a tall butterfly bush about the size of a small tree.

"Fowers! Fowers!" He pointed.

When we finished the walk, I set him up in his booster and gave him some raisins and crackers and went into the backyard. Despite our luck at owning a large lot of land, we're lazy landscapers and the only pickable flowers we have are lilies, bulbs planted everywhere long ago by the husband's grandmother. Lilies grow around this ailing stone well (a non-functional barbecue) and along the side of the house, next to patches of dirt that our cats use as a bathroom and sprouting their way through matted yellow grass and Virginia Creeper that has spread up our fence in a narrow column, getting wider and thicker every day. I clipped three pale pink lillies and brought them inside to Ian, who was dropping his Sesame Street crackers into a plastic cup of milk to see what would happen.

"Look, Ian."

"Fowers!"

I put them in a slim vase with water and put the vase on the kitchen table. Ian reached for them.

"Want to smell the flowers, honey? Want to smell the flowers?"

"Yah! Yah! Fowers!"

I held the vase for him. Big sniff. A smile. "Aahhh," he said. "Fowers."