Mom’s favorite flower is the yellow rose, and on the most momentous of the year’s days (including Mother’s Day and Mom’s birthday), Dad brings home a big bouquet of yellow roses. “What do you think of that one, Rog?” he pointed from his power cart at a bouquet of 18 yellow roses.  “Let’s get it,” he encouraged without awaiting my affirmation, and I placed the flowers in the basket.  He asked me what I thought about a second bouquet of muti-colored flowers, and instructed me to add it to the basket.  Then a third, with roses the color of sweet aromatic ripe cantaloup, joined the other bouquets.  “Are all of these for Mom?” I wondered.  “Of course!  It’s her birthday!”  One 18-rose bouquet would tell her she is special, a second that she is very special.  But a third would make a definite statement about her being supremely special, especially to him.  Stuck in a chair he exits only with difficulty and pain, Dad often calls to Mom, “If you were to walk by, I would give you a hug.”  Or sometimes, the more direct, “I want to hug you.”  Just when I expect her to huff with the sentimentality and inconvenience, she sidles up to him, holds his hand, caresses his head, kisses his cheek, and reaffirms her love: “I love you, too, Dear.”  Mom at her most tender.  She held his hand today, too, in the radiology recovery room after the lumbar puncture that sucked from him two tablespoons of spinal fluid, sent to the Mayo Clinic with his blood for advanced diagnostics.  Dad is hopeful that a firm diagnosis can finally be had, with a corresponding treatment.  I am hopeful his fighting spirit can outlast the ticking months of decline without diagnosis.  Answers bring knowledge, and with knowledge, hope.  Having no answer to the mystery causes of his mystery disease is like waiting for the ice to melt in the arctic: a very long wait with an uncertain outcome of dubious value.  His head still rang with singing from Mom’s birthday party the night before, at which the family gathered and sang the old campfire songs—nearly the whole book of them—we have sung around real campfires through three decades of family reunions.  Old songs like “Springtime in the Rockies” (chorus lyrics below).  During their occasional moments of marital tension, I tell them “I can’t take it” and I leave the room, and Dad assures me later that he has never had an argument with my mother, has never even been angry with her, which is nonsense, of course.  But these are sentiments he honors and believes and embodies.  My father loves and honors my mother.  He seeks her counsel and her tender affections still, after 60 years of marriage.  And he gives her big bouquets of yellow roses.

When it’s springtime in the Rockies,
I’m coming back to you.
Little sweetheart of the mountains,
With your bonnie eyes of blue.
Once again, I’ll say I love you,
While the birds sing all the day.
When it’s springtime in the Rockies,
In the Rockies far away.