Local Flora

Too often overlooked because of their undemanding ways. Local flora wait demurely like wallflowers never asked to dance, while exotic flora flirt for attention. Exotic flora must always be primped and pampered. Local flora grow on their own without need for preening admirers.

            The beauty of local flora is natural. No need for admirers to make them bloom.

           No one noticed Flora. She was plain in every way with plain brown hair, plain brown eyes, and plainly intent on blending into the background. Flora blossomed in the peaceful stillness of the background.
          She went her own way. She followed her own thoughts. She dreamed her own dreams. No one noticed Flora.

          Just as she intended.

           Her father was a drunkard who beat her mother on the few occasions when he was around. Her brothers and sisters hid on these occasions.

           Flora avoided these occasions by being out of the house, elsewhere, anywhere.
She roamed the second-growth greenery of vacant urban lots and the solitude of abandoned industrial sites.
          These were ignored places where nature was free to reclaim the savaged earth with local flora; self-actualizing plants dismissed as weeds and scrub by those who had forgotten how to see. Flora thought they were beautiful.

Flora saw their beauty because they reflected the beauty
in herself.

           With no one to interfere, Flora and local flora, could bloom in their own special ways.

           The local flora bloomed and died, over and over, each new growth unique to itself as Flora was unique to herself. Sometimes Flora wondered why she was so different from those around her.

           Flora’s pet was a dime-store turtle. Despite her best efforts to make a happy home for her turtle, the turtle died.
In tears, Flora wrapped the tiny body in tissue paper with a matchbox for coffin and buried it. She marked the grave with a cross of two twigs. A few days later, her sisters dug-up the grave to see what turtle bones looked like.

           Flora wondered if God had planted her in the wrong place?

           Why were people so mean?

           She couldn’t talk to them. They wouldn’t listen, so she talked to herself, not out loud but with written words. Flora had a way of putting words together in beautiful combinations.

           It was many years before she discovered there was
a name for this – poetry.

          Teachers noticed Flora’s skill with words. They praised her and urged her to do more.
They printed her poems in the school bulletin. She was assigned to a special class for gifted students. Flora was happy for this but she was sad that the rich kids, the only other students in her special class, looked down on her because her clothes were cheap and she was poor and lived in a poor part of town.

           A city newspaper sent a reporter to tell her story. The rich kids were nicer to her after that. An elderly professor read the newspaper story of this remarkable young girl. He took her under his tutelage. In time, she discovered there was a whole wide world of fascinating art and knowledge beyond the impoverished world in which she had been born.

           While her world expanded, so too did Flora’s beauty. The plain little girl grew to be as beautiful outside as she was inside. This created a new problem. People doubted such a lovely girl could also be smart. Flora proved them wrong with poem after poem, and book after book.
          Only a few knew she would do all this whether praised, or not praised.

           She went her own way. She followed her own thoughts. She dreamed her own dreams.

          Local flora grow as they will.

           It’s up to the rest of us to see their beauty.  

These are some of the local flora that florish
on my backyard deck. They plant themselves
and take care of themselves. They are watered by the rain
and pruned by insects. They neither require my help
nor do I offer any. I think they’re quite beautiful.









A Few Years

Faulkner's Gothic South