One Word Wednesday: BEAUTY in our backyard (and front!)

My mother was never one to stop and watch a sunset or spend hours in an art gallery or museum soaking up the beauty of a painting or sculpture.  Mom was a worker.  She found beauty in a job well done.  And she had no regrets about it.  So 4 or 5 years ago when my mom became obsessed with the trees in my neighborhood and wanted to talk about them A LOT, it was unexpected.

Our neighborhood was built 20 years ago by one of the major developers here in DFW.  We are brick houses...one 2-story, one 1-story, two 2-story, one 1-story...all in neat little suburban rows.

And each home, each lot, has a Crepe Myrtle tree.  One in the front yard, near the house.  Our streets are lined with Asian Pear trees that are starting to die...sigh....  But the Crepe Myrtles are going strong.  We actually have THREE at our house.  We added one in the back yard and one in the side yard.

And my mother is OBSESSED with them.

She will sit in the front room or on the back porch and become captivated by these trees.  "Oh, look how pretty they are.", she will say and look eagerly at me to see if I have noticed the beautiful, big pink blooms.  "Have you ever seen anything so pretty in your life?", she will ask.  These trees are where she find BEAUTY.

Conversation about their BEAUTY is a constant in our new care giving family.  When mom doesn't know what else to talk about or can't follow a conversation, she will talk about these trees.  When mom is just about to doze off for a nap, she will sigh and murmur something about those flowers.  When the kids can't seem to calm her down, their go-to phrase is "Grandma!  Look!  The trees are blooming...aren't they pretty?"

The main streets in our neighborhood are lined with well-maintained Crepe Myrtles.  Hundreds of them.  Mom loves to go for car rides to see them.  She loves to get in the car and go, but has terrible anxiety if we get too far from home.  So, every day, I put her in the car and we drive about 2 miles just looking at the Crepe Myrtles.  Sometimes we stop and I will take a picture of them and show it to her on my phone and she will smile.  Sometimes we pull to the side of the road just under their branches and I roll down her window so she can look up at the flowers.  Sometimes I cut a bloom off our tree and put it in a glass of water on the patio table by her favorite chair.

This is a new part of mom.  Something that she was always too busy to be in her Pre-Alzheimer's life.  But now, she has time for BEAUTY.  And mom finds her in these beautiful trees right outside our window.

Linking up at My Sweet Peanut for another One Word Wednesday.  Today we got to share stories about BEAUTY...nice way to start my day!