Perhaps it is my age; NO, maybe it is the circumstances in which I find myself at this age; WELL, maybe it is much more than a simple explanation, or a chance to identify this emotion, to just be able to simply state, my state of mind; BUT, here on the Cape it was actually the kind of day in spring, which, when the winds caressed my skin, whizzed by me and played hide and seek with my clothing, I actually heard the past, smelled the fragrances of once upon, and felt my heart blossom as might that of a petal of a plant or the bud of a leaf. And here I was in North Truro, recalling walking through the Spring Flower Show at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, with my little sister, and of course, My Aunt Meercy, who I had no idea was our guide to Culture and Nature, and INSIGHT, as I grew up!
The Conservatory was a delight, and the array of flowers and plants for a young kid, was like observing the Earth, and thinking just how immense and many colors, fragrances, and kinds of flowers there actually were. My Aunt was one who believed that education was always premier so as we wandered the various collections and gardens and rooms, we not only ooh’ed and ahh’ed my Aunt taught us that A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives more than two years. An annual plant is a plant that completes its life cycle, from germination to the production of seeds, within one growing season, and then dies. A weed is a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation, "a plant in the wrong place". Adding her own take on each definition, trying to slip in some Aunt Meercy philosophy, and hopefully her own imprint on her niece and nephew; my Aunt added the following: Life seems like forever, one day to the next, one year to the next if we are lucky, we blossom over and over again, and each time, the color may be more defined the shape larger, we are the same, but seek to be different than what we were before, like a PERENNIAL. Sometimes life gets tricky, she would add, and we come back again but something new must be learned, some change must be made, we take nothing for granted because to do so, may not avail you of the second third of 100th chance, like an ANNUAL.
My sister and I, the older we got, began to understand a point my Aunt was making that life may repeat itself, but we have the chance of a slight change in the road ahead, we take it, taking nothing at all for granted. And then as we began our exit from these bountiful halls, my Aunt would stop, turn us around from facing the exit doors, and say. “There are no weeds here, NONE!” “Not because the weeds don’t want a chance to show off, but because WEEDS are users, they take, and take, never give back, and look pretty perhaps, until you understand that all they do is undermine Mother Nature.” “Once weeds grow,” my Aunt Meercy would say, as she took out her handkerchief to dab her lipstick, “they never want to leave, until they leave anything around them sad and broken.” My sister and I looked a bit shaken, and my Aunt would then say, “It is your job to stop anything that does not bring hope and heart from growing in your garden.”
Today, I heard that entire lecture, as I walked past the flora ready to embrace their new year, and I thought; 2020 and its annex year 2021have grown a whole bunch of WEEDS, and it IS my job to pull them from their roots!
