Usually when my family asks what I want for a gift, I can’t think of anything.
I have everything I need, I tell them, and I can never think of what I want when they ask for gift suggestions.
This year, for Mother’s Day, I did come up with something. I told my husband I want a Mary statue for the flowerbed in the back yard.
We already have a St. Francis statue back there, one that I think was a gift to my mother-in-law probably 20 or 25 years ago. St. Francis stands in the flower bed at the south edge of the yard, next to a rabbit statue that is at least half the saint’s size.
They’re both between clumps of daylilies, yellow on one side and dark red on the other.
Mary, I think, will go in the other flowerbed, on the west edge of the yard, next to the climbing roses along the back of the garage.
I’d like to have Mary there when I’m outside pulling weeds and cutting flowers, while I’m watering the vegetables growing in their containers, while we’re sitting at the picnic table for dinner or around the fire pit on warm summer evenings.
I don’t think she’ll inspire me to sit outside and pray, at least not formally. It’s not like the statue of St. Francis has led me to recite his prayer while rinsing and filling the bird bath. Besides, to me, the rosary is an excellent prayer to accompany a run or walk, something where I have the use of my hands to keep track on my fingers if a set of rosary beads is not immediately available. That doesn’t work with hands covered with dirt.
When I’m in the garden, my thoughts meander, wandering from the job at hand to what my kids are doing to memories of time spent outdoors in the past. Pondering life, you might say.
Mary, of course, pondered things in her heart. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Mary pondered things in her heart, both after the narrative of the birth of Jesus and after Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, forcing Mary and Joseph to go back and look for him, and then told them that they should have known he would be in his father’s house.
I don’t have such momentous things as trying to raise the Messiah to ponder, for which I am profoundly grateful. My concerns are more mundane: Is that weed poison ivy? Is it going to rain or should I water? When will the first tomatoes be ripe? What should we have for dinner?
But I bet Mary pondered those things, too.