From today's TIMES and NEWS-STAR
Did
you ever pay attention, in your 20s, to a flower? If you are 30 or older, when
you look back on your younger days, do you imagine this rose or that one, this
azalea, that pistachio or crabapple tree, and how your heart longs to go back
and … ?
Shoot,
no. Me either.
Until
I was deep into my 30s, I can never remember looking for any length of time at
a plant or at a flower, not unless it was on the communion table in front of
the pulpit. There were always pretty flowers on Sunday mornings, often left
over from a wedding or a funeral. And they were right there so you almost had
to look at them, unless you wanted to stare at the baptistery or at the hairdo
in front of you. People my age know the visual challenges that come with
sitting behind a beehive.
Way
back then, the only other time I remember looking at flowers or shrubs is if my
golf ball was in one.
We
had a garden when I was a boy, annually. Lots of stuff grew. I don’t recall it
being pretty. It was more of a rural appreciation for things you could eat. To
most people in my hometown, a ripe tomato carried a lot more weight in the
Pretty Department than an orchid, now that I think about it.
Also
we were a shrub people. Low maintenance. Easy to mow around. Dependable. So we
cut grass and pruned shrubs and tended gardens and saw flowers on Sundays and
in magazines. Tobacco and soybean and corn fields were our begonias.
But
with age comes an appreciation for things you’ve been looking at all your life
but not seeing. Spring is a little different to us now than it was Back Then. I
hope I appreciate color and texture more and just how odd it is, and
unexplainable, that this keeps happening over and over.
The
father of a son, I used to watch boys grow. But since I haven’t been to many
little-boy ball practices lately, there’s a bit more time to pay attention to
this thing I planted in my back yard late last winter called, I think, a purple
leaf plum, and another called a forest pansy redbud. They are small trees. I
hate to use the word “excited” but I was close to that when I saw actual purple
leaves on the plum tree. How does it do that? I have not seen forest pansy
leaves or any kind of leaves on the redbud and hope the frost or me personally didn’t
kill it over the winter, but I think there are buds there. As the sun is doing around
here after all the rain, my tree is trying.
The
temperamental dogwood and a pink-leaved peach tree, both sophomores, are trying
too. What if these things actually live and keep blooming every March? What if
I actually live and get to see it? Daily Double!
But
once they bloom, will I forget about them? It’s natural to take beauty, often
viewed, for granted. Infants are too wise for that; what people who are tiny in
age do is see the same things over and over again, but as if for the first
time.
An
Englishman named G. K. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. A newspaper editor
for much of that time, he wrote thousands of essays and, because he weighed
about 400 pounds and was absent-minded, developed a reputation of having both a
genius and a personality hard to fence in. Witty, you ask?. He’s credited with
jewels like “Vice demands virgins,” and “The worst moment for an atheist is
when he is really thankful and has no one to thank.”
An
essay I read about him this week came at just the right time for me:
springtime. His warned me not to miss it.
God,
Chesterton wrote, “is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that
God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it
again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies
alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired
of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we
have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we are.”
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