We will have a memorial service for my mom, Clara Eberly, on Saturday, May 12th, 10:30 am at First Presbyterian Church, Hanford. Something really beautiful happened last week, and if interested, read on…

Love is such an interesting thing. I led a lesson on love for our Men’s Group Tuesday morning. One of the things we are told in I Corinthians 13 is that love is kind. Tuesday was May 1st, and it reminded me of a kindness my mother used to practice. May 1st is May Day, and somewhere in my mom’s formative years, she learned a tradition that on May Day, you deliver some hand picked flowers to the doorstep of your neighbor. She would send us kids up to the door of our neighbors, mostly the elderly ones. We would put the flowers on the porch, ring the doorbell, and then run and hide. When our neighbors would answer the door, there would be a nice set of fresh flowers. They would look for us, but we were kids, four, five, six years old. We had to be hidden really well. Or maybe they couldn’t help spot us peeking out from behind trees and benches and fences. Anyway, they played along well, smiled, and went back into their houses with a happier heart. And through my mom, I learned that love is kind.

I told the men my May Day story this past Tuesday. One of the men did something really kind. My mom is in hospice care. That same Tuesday afternoon, he ordered some flowers, had them delivered to my mom, with a note, “Happy May Day.” When my mom got the flowers, my sister Anne said she broke out in the biggest smile. And what goes around comes around. The kindness of love came back to rest on my mom.

But there was something more. Until the flowers came from our friend here at Pines, Anne had forgotten it was May Day. In fact, she didn’t even put two and two together when a woman had come to visit the day before and talked about May Day. The woman is the caregiver for Mrs. Senna. Mrs. Senna lives on Fitzgerald Lane, the street we all grew up on. She has lived there a long time. A really long time. Mrs. Senna is 110 years old. She couldn’t come visit my mom, so she sent her caregiver. The caregiver told my sister that Mrs. Senna always talked about the Eberly kids and the flowers we would deliver on May Day. Mrs. Senna wanted our family to know something which blew me away. Apparently there is a burlap sack, we called them gunny sacks growing up, but there is a burlap sack in Mrs. Senna’s garage. In that gunny sack are the remains of every single set of fresh flowers all of us Eberly kids ever delivered to her door on May Day. We moved to our house on Fitzgerald Lane in 1960 and my mom didn’t move until well after the year 2000. And in the garage of a woman who is 110 are all the flowers that showed up on her doorstep for some 50 years. Mrs. Senna has a burlap sack that is just about as perfect a demonstration that there could be that love is kind.

Wayne Eberly