My sister Carol, bless her heart, spends many Sunday afternoons with my Mom. My brothers Jim and Rick are there on Saturdays and they mow her lawn and take her to the store and the library so that she can renew her large print books for the week.

During the week, she does take the car out and goes the few blocks to the grocery store if she needs a few things and that is a scary thought to most of us, except her, of course. But everybody looks the other way and she maintains her independence.

So, while I was in Wisconsin, I had the opportunity to participate in the Sunday afternoon flower extravaganza at the nursery with my sister and my Mom.

The nursery in Wisconsin is three times bigger than any nursery near me in California. They have herbs, and vegetables and rows upon rows of flowers. It is overwhelming. I had to call Carol on my cell phone to find her in this place, since I met them and didn't arrive with them.

No wonder. There are only a few months to plant and enjoy a garden in Wisconsin and everybody is out indulging their long, pent-up need to be outside with their hands in the earth.

And so, there we were, engaging in the painstaking process of selecting the right flowers for two hanging baskets for my Mom's front porch. Well, we were well into the geraniums, but they had to be trailing geraniums. So we located some that were right. Then my Mom had to choose. This is no small matter. Carol had given her a gift certificate to the nursery for Christmas and my Mom wanted to choose just the right plant with just the right number of buds that looked appropriately promising for a hanging basket. And we had two of them to fill. The decision was made that there should be three plants in each hanging basket. OK, good. Then my Mom remembered that there was a plant she had in the hanging basket last summer that she liked, but she couldn't remember what it was. We hemmed and hawed, Carol and my Mom thought and thought. It was an asparagus fern. We managed to find some with help from one of the red-shirted nursery helpers wandering the rows, placing new plants in place of the ones that had been selected for purchase. Lo and behold it was the perfect complement.

So then we needed to go back and plant all of these things and also the lillies and other things that we had decided upon along the way.

My cousin, Mary, and her two college-age daughters, twins, Libby and Sarah, showed up after we got back to my Mom's and that was a treat. So we planted and chatted and pretty soon those hanging baskets looked pretty good and the lillies were in the ground and all watered and Sunday afternoon was gently slipping away.