In celebration and memoriam...

Hello dear friends.  For the past 5 months, Mr. Bird's mom, Mrs. Lady Bird, has been fighting pancreatic cancer.  I'm sad to share with you that she passed away earlier this month.  Her loss is felt acutely by all who knew her because she was an exceptional woman. 

And while we are sad that she is no longer with us, we celebrate knowing she is no longer suffering.  We also celebrate because we know she would have wanted that.  Each part of the family is celebrating in their own ways.  Mr. Bird's dad is building a memorial fountain in Mrs. Lady Bird's garden.  She was a master gardener.  Somehow she could take anything, no matter how sad or close to dying, and turning it into a beautiful plant.  Her thumb was bright green!  Her garden was filled with all kinds of lovely things, all lovingly tended to.  Mr. Bird used to tell me she would pull the car over on the side of the road to get a clipping of a plant or flower that caught her eye.  She even loved to weed!

So it's really no surprise that when I thought about how to celebrate her I thought about our garden.  A few months back I was given one of those tiny rose bushes from Trader Joe's for my birthday.  It pretty much died in a week, but Mr. Bird encouraged me to plant it in a pot and see what would happen.  It bloomed! I remember thinking how proud Mrs. Lady Bird would be to hear that.  She loves roses and had these amazing white roses everywhere: by the front door, in the front yard, and in the backyard.  I had always meant to ask her what they were and if I could grow them too.  A few days after her service Mr. Bird and I were shopping and found ourselves surrounded by these roses in the mall.

Once we returned home I visited our nursery on a whim.  I called Mrs. Lady Bird's best friend and she gladly told me the name of the roses, how to take care of them, and how and when to plant them.  Iceberg roses.  To my great relief the nursery had them.  Score!  I spied a whole stack of half wine barrels while walking thru the nursery and when I was asking her about potting them she said the barrels would be great.  I bought the best looking white Iceberg rosebush they had and headed to Mr. Bird's school to surprise him.  He was busy getting his classroom ready for the first day of school.

Iceberg Roses

The following weekend I took him back to the nursery so he could pick out the wine barrel.  That's kind of a guy thing and I wanted him to be involved.  Then we set out to find pretty trailing flowers to plant in the barrel with the roses.  We found these great pink and purple flowers, whose name is on the plastic stick somewhere in the garden (I'll update you on the name I promise) and headed home.

Pretty trailing flowers.

When we got home Mr. Bird set to work drilling drainage holes and adding casters so we could move the barrel as the seasons changed.  He worked at it for quite some time.  I could hear the drill, then the sander, and then silence which worried me.  When he finally summoned me to check out his work I was very impressed.  He had sanded down all the rough edges after adding the drainage and casters, then rubbed it with wood oil which made the barrel just gorgeous.

On the two week anniversary of her passing, we planted Mrs. Lady Bird's memorial garden.

Mrs. Lady Bird's garden.

As we try to heal, we find little reminders of her everywhere we go.  We try to remember her kindness towards others, her zest for life, and her boundless creativity.  To call her a Mexican Martha Stewart is really an understatement.  She has style and grace that radiated from her.  This is not the first time our family has lost someone dear to pancreatic cancer.  Mrs. Lady Bird's own mother passed from the same disease.  Her sister passed after a long fight with colon cancer and her brother beat prostate cancer.  These tragedies touch us all deeply so the family has decided to encourage people to make donations towards pancreatic cancer research.  The survival rate is 2% and little is known about the disease since there are so few survivors.  Mrs. Lady Bird was diagnosed by a wonderful group of doctors at UCLA.  We have chosen to have donations made to the Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation at UCLA where you can specifically ear mark your donation to go to pancreatic cancer research.  To learn more click here. 

Thank you to everyone, in real life, and in the cyber world for your love, prayers, support, cat sitting, dinner delivery, phone calls, emails, and healing vibes during these last months.  I have never been so touched as I have been during this time of need.  Our entire family has been blessed by all of you.

Please stay tuned for some exciting announcements about a new line in my Etsy shop in Mrs. Lady Bird's honor and memory. Proceeds from this new line will go to support research.

Many humble thanks,
this little bird