“It’s me Pansy Potts. I can’t answer the phone right now because I’m out clowning around. But if you leave your message I’ll call ‘ya right back.  I ain’t no shrinking violet.” I heard this message on our answering machine countless times growing up in the  Sacramento Valley. Indeed, my mom, Emily Potts, was no shrinking violet; she was Pansy Potts the clown.

For fifty years, Emily Potts worked for public libraries teaching gardening to youngsters. As a child I felt embarrassed to admit she was my mom even though my classmates loved her persona. Pansy Potts donned a flamboyant  cracked pot hat  with macrame bumble bees and violas springing about on pipe cleaners and fishing wire. Pansy Potts’s exaggerated movements were carefully choreographed by fuzzy bees and wild violets intriguingly dancing around her face as she spoke.

Emily was born during the Great Depression. She was the youngest daughter of migrant workers but never worked a day in the fields. Emily’s older sisters labored alongside  their parents hoisting plums into baskets. The family scraped a living off their owner’s land. Emily, in contrast, ran barefoot along the rows of mature plum trees inventing imaginary friends such as Forget-Me-Not and Daffy Dill. But it was the  wild violets with their delicate, sweet aroma that ran out to play with Emily each February just in time for her birthday. Emily deliciously gathered the wayward  violets that etched their path along the irrigation ditches and smudge pots.  It was in these plum orchards that Emily developed an affinity with nature.

It was an affinity that accompanied her into her eighties when she entered a nursing home after a stroke. She could neither speak  nor walk but how her eyes lit up with each bouquet of pansies delivered  to her room. I was sheltering in place in   a distant country when mom passed, just  days before her birthday. I sat next to my window and simply  sketched pansies while imagining that little girl chasing wayward violets.