Finally, though, they climbed back over the hill and returned to their car for the drive home. For miles, while the kids chattered and the man drove, the woman sat in silence, surrounded by her flowers. Her smile was now one of contentment, and in her eyes Was a faraway look.

When they were Within three miles of home, she suddenly shouted to her husband, “Stop the car! Stop right here!”

The man slammed on the brakes. Before he could ask why she wanted to stop, the woman was out of the car and hurrying up a grass slope with the boughs of lilacs.

At the top of the hill was a nursing home. Because it was a such beautiful spring day, many patients were outdoors, strolling with relatives or sitting on the porch.

The young woman went straight to the end of the where in elderly lady was sitting in her wheelchair, alone, head bowed. Across the railing went the flowers, into the hip of the old woman. She lifted her head and smiled. For a few moments, the two women chatted,
both aglow with happiness, and then the young woman turned and ran back to her family.

As the car pulled away, the woman in the wheelchair waved and clutched the lilacs to her bosom.

Inside the car, the kids asked, “Mom, who was that? Why did you give her our flowers? Is she somebody’s mother?”

The mother said no, she didn’t know the old woman; she had never seen her before. But it was Mother’s Day, and she seemed so alone, and who wouldn’t be cheered by flowers?

“And besides,” she added, “I have all of you, and I still have my mother, even if she is far away. That woman needed those flowers more than I did.”

That satisfied the kids, but not the husband. The next day he purchased half a dozen young lilac bushes and planted them around their yard. And several times since then he has added some more.

I know. I was that man. The young mother was, and is, my wife.

Now, every May, our own yard is fragrant with lilacs. And every Mother’s Day, our kids gather purple bouquets for their mother, jUst as she gathered them that first year.

And every year I remember that smile on a lonely old woman’s face, and the kindness that put it there.