A surprise is, by its nature, unexpected. Nonetheless, I was amazed to realise this morning that the little African violet has escaped detection and, therefore, destruction from Young Guy, who attacks all the plants that are on the shelf over the kitchen sink. He gets up in the window as I am preparing their meals and chomps off their leaves.
Those brave little flowers along with my super leggy geraniums are about the sole glimpse of spring we'll see here for a long time yet. (Compare this with someone down in Kentucky who is crowing about the snowdrops already peeking their heads up, something I won't see until April.)
The water bottle in the background is the sole surviving Episcopal Relief and Development bottle I have. The other week when the temperature was in the sub-zero region, I tried to bring both frozen bottles into the house to thaw out. I dropped one on the shed floor (cement) and though the bottle is made out of plastic, it shattered.
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You can allegorise both thoughts to your heart's content... I don't have it in me for deep thoughts.
Perhaps that I have been carrying all day with me my mother's call this morning. She's trying to figure out what to write (she is of the school that one sends out sympathy notes as soon as possible) to someone my age or thereabouts from my hometown, whose husband jumped in front of a commuter train last Thursday. The only clue they have to his suicide is a letter of termination from his employer that he would have received that day but I would hazard there was a lot more going on. All I can pray is that he find in death the peace he couldn't find in life. And I pray for his widow and their two children who have to deal with the aftermath of his violent and tragic act.
So let that little African violet be a sign of life in the midst of death.
1 comment:
So let that little African violet be a sign of life in the midst of death.
Amen, Caminante. I have six African violets on top of my closed sewing cabinet, which tend to do very well. I've concluded that proper exposure and no over-watering is what works best for me. I don't have a particularly green thumb.
Because of the location of the plants, I'm much less motivated to sew, since I have to move all six of them to open the top of the cabinet.
A young man in our church congregation, who is one of our few African-American members and who is also gay, was standing nearby at coffee hour while I was talking to a group about my African violets, and he chimed in, "That's me. I'm your African violet." We all cracked up. I said, "Joe, you said that, not me." Not exactly PC, is it? But now, I often refer to him as my African violet.
He's going off to seminary soon.
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