FIELD NOTE 3.50 - Things my mother gave me.

In all our time apart I've finally grown to realize all the things my mother has given me that I've always taken for granted or else completed overlooked: my will-not-be-tamed hair, my pale skin, my overly prominent wristbones.

But of all the things she's given me, the one that I am the most proud of is also one of the strangest: an abject hatred of the forsythia plant. Every spring and fall when we would see the forsythia plants growing in my grandmother's neighbor's yard my mother would tell me of how she always attributed the plants to the end of things: the end of school in the spring, the end of summer in the fall. She grew to hate the plant. And so the hatred passed to me, an unintentional legacy.
The forsythia here has begun to bloom in the past week and I must pass a bed of the plants every morning to make my way to the tram - and every morning I feel the slight tensing of my shoulderblades as I hurry past the delicate yellow flowers. I tell myself it's silly to hold such a strong aversion for a flower, but still it remains. Every morning that I see the flower my thoughts automatically go to the ends of things. Just as they did for my mother, the flowers now stand for the impending end of the school year here in Nantes.
This has become too much for me to even think about and so I have started walking from my residence to my classes - a much longer way, but one that doesn't force me to see a single forsythia.