Flowers of Grace

Memory of Grandma Grace from Elin Jenson Roberts

Every summer my family would make the 20-ish hour trek from Texas to Utah to visit our maternal and paternal grandparents. For one week of each year, we spent our evenings up at the cabin and our days down in Orem with Grandpa and Grandma Farnsworth. I am one of the youngest grandchildren and unfortunately do not have many vivid memories of Grandma Farnsworth from back then. What I do remember is how gentle she was and how much I enjoyed the meals she made. Her homemade bread was heaven and memories of her home-canned pickles make me salivate still. But I think the memory I will always associate with Grandma Grace revolves around flowers. 

For a family history project, my mother, Marilyn, wrote the following about grandma:

"Every Saturday night from about Easter to the first frost in the fall,  mom went out and gathered buckets of flowers which she somehow managed to cram into our refrigerator. Then on Sunday morning she would get up early and create the most beautiful floral arrangements you can imagine. She or Dad, if he was home, would carry them to the church before the first meetings began and then retrieve them late at night after the last ward finished. One Sunday my Bishop got up and quoted a line from the hymn 'There is Sunshine in My Soul Today,' which reads:

For when the Lord is near
The dove of peace sings in my heart
The flowers of grace appear

Mom's bouquets were works of art that faded in a day but which brought the Spirit of the Lord near with their beauty and fragrance."

When I was at BYU, Grandma and Grandpa lived in an assisted living home for a time. Every so often, I would go and visit them, and on one particular visit, I brought with me a store-bought bouquet of flowers. When I presented them to Grandma, she felt the petals and the leaves and said how beautiful they were. She told me where to find a vase and some scissors which I collected and gave to her. I knew she had already lost much of her eyesight, so I watched in wonder as she felt her way around the flowers, cutting stems to different lengths and then arranging them in the vase. I was amazed at her natural ability--that she was able to make something lovely, even more beautiful without the use of her eyes.