Columbine

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When we bought our home in South Dakota, we planed columbine in a bed in front of our house. We were happy to be in the hills after decades of living in prairies and cities. We figured the altitude of our house and its setting in a pine forest would support the delicate mountain flowers and we were right.

Then, in the spring of 1999, the Columbine High School massacre occurred. It struck especially close to home for us. We two high school students in our home, one a senior. And the year previously, we had a third student in our home, an exchange student from Japan. The physical layout of our children’s school was similar to Columbine High School, which we got to know fairly well through hours of news footage covering the tragic events of that day. For the rest of that school year, our children experienced repeated school evacuations caused by phoned in threats and tips warning of a copycat event. Although no such event occurred, students, teachers and parents were on edge. Our daughter found the evacuations to be especially frightening and confusing.

Somewhere along the line, we simply stopped growing the columbine in our beds. Columbine is a perennial, so I guess the delicate flowers got crowded out by the ever expanding iris bulbs in the ground or perhaps were pulled out along with weeds at some point. Whatever was the case, we kind of forgot about the columbine. The association of the flower with the shooting at the high school dampened our enthusiasm for the delicate blossoms.

With so many mass shootings, including fairly frequent school shootings over the years since Columbine, we have become a bit numb to the death and pain and grief and loss. There is just a tiny bit less shock when such an even occurs. There is a decrease in the attention we pay to the news reports. We still share the sadness and grief, but in smaller ways. Our children have grown up and somehow we feel just a little bit less vulnerable. We aren’t ignoring the violence of our communities, but it doesn’t occupy the same place in our consciousness as once was the case and our emotional reaction to shootings, even school shootings is a but less intense.

This spring marked the 22nd anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. The victims would be entering their forties this year as are the survivors.

We’ve moved on. Our home in Rapid City has a new owner who, I’m sure, is planning new plants for the beds and garden. We find ourselves in a rental house in Mount Vernon, Washington, a place with entirely different weather and a whole new set of plants. Because the landscaping and flower beds were planted by others, this spring has been a time of discovery. We were told that the tradition around here is to prune rose bushes on President’s Day. February seemed a bit early, but we had some fine weather and out came the pruning shears. I’ve never had so many rose bushes and the process took a couple of different attempts. Not long afterward, blossoms began to appear. The Skagit Valley is famous for daffodils and tulips and there were a few of those in the beds around our house. There are a lot more grape hyacinths that add color. Yellow and white blossoms appeared on plants whose names we don’t know. The apple and cherry trees put forth both fragrance and beautiful blossoms.

We have plants in our yard that are new to us: Japanese maple and rhododendron. Some of the rhododendrons have bloomed, but we can tell that there are a lot more blossoms yet to come. One rhododendron is just starting to open red flowers and we can tell it will turn into a riot of color in coming days. We have canna lilies growing by our front door. We’ve never lived in a place where lilies thrive.

In the midst of all of this we noticed, in a small bed at the corner of the sidewalk and the driveway, the gentle tiny flowers of purple. There is a columbine plant in our front yard. It is not what we expected. Columbine is a mountain flower. Although we have a dramatic view of Mount Baker and delight in the beauty of the Cascade Mountains rising to the east of our home, Mount Vernon is only 180 feet above sea level. With the exception of Chicago, where we attended graduate school and lived for four years, Mount Vernon is the lowest elevation we’ve ever lived. We didn’t expect to see an alpine flower in the beds of our house here.

In the scheme of things, the little plant is a tiny piece of the landscaping here. The beds are fairly lightly planted, the product of the house being a rental with residents who come and go and have varying skills and interests in caring for the outdoor plants. Perennials are the things that do best in this environment.

When we become more settled in this place, after we have found a home to purchase and have gotten ourselves moved yet another time, we’ll get serious about what kind of plants we want to have around our home. We’ve already discovered that being retired gives us more time and energy for caring for our yard. Having a smaller yard with less to mow also gives more time and energy for the care of outside plants. We don’t have a vegetable garden this year, so we’ll be dependent on the stores and the abundant gardens at our son’s farm, but we’ll want to grow some of our own vegetables plus herbs and a bit of peppermint for tea once we get settled.

Perhaps as part of the landscape plan when we get our new place, I’ll find a spot for columbine. We wouldn’t need many plants, just a few to show up in April each year as a memorial to the lives lost and a reminder of the grief of families and the trauma experienced by classmates and students of that generation. We don’t want to forget.

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