A quiet tradition has been unfolding among a select group of Dexter High School graduates for years: receiving a jade plant and a short poem to accompany them as their future lives unfold.
The tradition started in 1983 when a 39-year-old woman, herself a mother of three high school kids and an administrative clerk for a city in Ohio, took an unexpected and impromptu vacation to San Diego, California. The young and vibrant woman named Ruth Maag, recently diagnosed with terminal, stage 4 cancer, asked her firefighter husband to splurge and take her on a faraway vacation, something they had never done before. Ruth had never been more than a four-hour drive by car from her home. Going to California, on an airplane, seemed exotic and a good antidote to distract her from the grim reality of her medical prognosis.
While in San Diego, Ruth fell in love with the jades that were ubiquitous yard plants, common in the neighborhood she visited by the beach. Just before leaving California, Ruth clipped a 6” branch from the bush in the front yard of the home she stayed in for five days, tucked it in a towel, and gently packed it in her suitcase for the return trip to Ohio…