A Walk into the Meaning of Flowers

Walking has always been a love of mine. My love affair with walking started when I was a kid. At about the age of eight I began to walk the big block in my hometown. The “big block” walk was a probably 35 to 40 minute walk out of town on a road leading south to a farm road which then led west to another farm road which meandered north and finally onto the main drag. When I hit this last stretch I walked past my church and then my grandmother’s home heading east to the center of town where I lived. Circling that block seemed like circumnavigating the globe when I was two foot shorter. On that walk was discovery of odd bits of things on the roadside. On that walk there was danger in barking dogs and garter snakes (hey, I was little). On that walk I was in my imagination a soldier, a pilot, a college professor and a stud.

Over the years when I have lived in suburbs or small cities I have always worked up a circuit to walk. Out I go most evenings clear, warm, cold raining, or snowing to stride for what is usually about 15 to 20 duration and passing by a number of houses of people I know and small parks. Out and about I greet my neighbors and I watch how nature pulls and tears at the artifices of mankind. The rusty Stop sign, the tilting telephone pole, the sinkhole in the road, these are all things that say humankind you really don’t matter. Crumbling and tilting our engineering marvels say that nature in the end will win out.

The imagination part has fallen by the wayside. I don’t think I have that much imagination left in me. What I have now are reflections and lists. Yep I carry and pen and paper and when I remember something I have to take care of I write it down. As I look at the houses I think about stories I have of the life I have lived. Sometimes I jot a line or two down and eventually it becomes a blog post. Occasionally I will imagine a place I would love to travel to and streets I would want to wander down much as I am wandering around these few blocks that surround my home.

Most every house I pass has some little detail that the owner (or some previous owner) installed to say something about themselves. It could be the interlacing of different colored bricks leading up to the front door. It might be lawn gnomes or a small statue of Buddha off to the side. Even in my neighborhood there is a bath tub Madonna. You know what that is right? A bathtub Madonna is a statue of the virgin set into a vertically buried bathtub that serves as a grotto for her.

Some folks put in water features. These are glorified kiddie pools that are black that have a stack of rocks nearby over which a pump from the black kiddie pool pumps water to trickle over the rocks simulate water coming down the face of a mountain. The one particular house I am seeing in my mind’s eye is smack dab in the middle of the flat Midwest. Hey if it gives the owner some peace and comfort I am all for it. I love this kind of stuff although it does strike me as kind of absurd.

And there are gardens. The flowers move me the most. Transient but colorful beyond what an old hippie on acid could muster up in his mind’s eye they unify humanity and nature. We plant them and nourish them but we do not own or build them. Flowers will be here when all the Taco Bells are gone. A stone Buddha will fall to the wind and rain becoming merely sand, such is impermanence. But a flower will cycle and its seeds will cycle and it is an affirmation of something most holy.