A Walk in Spring | First Person

By Jennifer De Leon

We walk. It is spring in Boston—finally, people love to say—and in Jamaica Plain, the season is bold. The lilacs are out to play. The azaleas. And soon, the rhododendrons. I am with my mother, a woman with the word flower literally at the center of her name, Dora Alicia Flores Urbina De Leon. Today, we take a pause from my stuffed calendar and her empty one to spend time in this place she first walked so many decades ago.

In the early 1970s, my mother emigrated from Guatemala to the U.S., leaving behind her parents and six younger siblings. But when her plane landed in Los Angeles, she wilted. She worked as a live-in housekeeper for a family who spoke only English. So homesick was she that one day she opened the phone book and randomly selected a Spanish surname. I imagine her dialing as she pressed the cold phone to her hot ear. A woman picked up, and the two of them spoke for hours. Four years passed before my mother returned to visit her birthplace, and it was just that: a visit. She knew America was her home now, and so she vowed to learn five English words a day, and embrace customs like wearing a bikini at the beach, driving a car, and saving money. She did all that and more. After she and my father met and he took a job in Boston, the two of them wrote love letters for a year until, one morning, she boarded another flight.

As my mother and I walk around Jamaica Pond, the wind flirting with the pink and white petals, releasing a sweet scent called spring, she tells me a story I have heard before, but today I listen as if it’s the first time. The day she moved to Massachusetts, her red-eye flight had arrived early. My father picked her up in his Datsun, but they couldn’t yet go to the apartment where he had arranged for her to live with a female friend, so they came to this pond. “I was so nervous,” she tells me. “We must’ve walked around the pond 10 times, but it felt like five minutes.”

“That’s so funny,” I say.

Today, nearly half a century later, her foot is bothering her; so, we sit. From the bench, we watch babies in strollers, joggers, rowboats, kites, birds, squirrels. But I can tell she is watching a different scene in her mind. She squints at the light reflecting off the water, amid the birds tweeting in the late April air. What does she see?

We are close to 180 different blossoms just around the bend, in the Arnold Arboretum, which like Jamaica Pond is part of the city’s Emerald Necklace. The color of the sky is practically periwinkle. And how could she have known, all those years ago, what would blossom here in this place called Boston?

Around this same pond, my husband and I had one of our first dates. Our careful steps crunched leaves in the Arnold Arboretum, and then we sat beside e.e. cummings’s grave in Forest Hills Cemetery, the words sweeping us beyond friendship: here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life.

My mother stirs. I offer her help in standing up, but she swats my hand away. She stand less than five feet tall, but carries a hundred hearts in her own. After putting down roots in this city, she and my father married, became U.S. citizens, had a baby girl, then another, then another. They bought a house, then one more. She pushed college on us more than marriage, and she used stories to heal and inspire and threaten. Because of her, we planted our own wishes. Maybe that’s what all these flowers are made of—wishes, or even prayers.

On this day, my mother and I stand. And once more, we walk.