Blog 793 -10.13.2017

Elephant Ears

Ours was not the upper middle class home of the Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, and the Donna Reed Show variety but I believe my parents like all parents did the best they could by their children. My dad worked hard and as many hours as he could get to keep food on the table and clothes on our backs and though while we were in school my mother never worked out side the home, my mama worked. She kept house, kept me and my brother clean, that alone was a tough and thankless-endless job, and our clothes washed and ironed, plus she did ironing for others by the piece for a little extra cash to make the food budget go a little farther or pay an extra bill. Hers must have seemed at times a very dreary life with so much drudgery. But my mama loved her boys and my mama kept flowers.

She must have had at any give time fifteen to twenty potted plants mostly different varieties, beef steak begonias, rubber plants, and a cactus-like plant that only bloomed once a year and then not every year, and even then only in the middle of the night, called “A Christ In The Manger” because the bloom resembled a manger scene complete with a single big star at the manger. But one of my favorites was The Elephant Ear Plant. Those big broad leaves that did resemble an elephant ear always reminded me of the jungle plants in Tarzan movies. I will be forever grateful to my sweet mama for all the extra watering and work she did to keep her not so secret garden alive not just for herself but for us.

My mother loved to read and read many books I am sure about wealthy folk with large mansions many of which had solariums filled with orchids and exotic plants the year round. Mom had no orchids, though she was one, but mom had an elephant ear plant and every year about this time dad would complete his annual ritual of buying vis-queen (not so see thru rolls of thick plastic) yard sticks, and blue steel sharp tacks to cover all the windows, screen doors, and screened-in back porch with the insulating plastic. Not until both of us boys were grown and married did my parents own a home with storm windows and an enclosed back porch. So each fall dad created this hot house from our screened back porch on the small house we rented to make for my mom her solarium so she could keep her not so secret garden year round. Amazingly many of those plants out lived her.

I have been working in Wisconsin for about a year and a half. A month or so ago I had an assignment in Lake Delton, near the Wisconsin Dells. I had lunch at a nice little barbecue place called Buffalo Bob’s and there to greet me on both sides of the entry way on the porch were two beauty elephant ear plants. Thanks Mom. I really needed that but then as I tell myself from time to time and anyone listening or reading: “ I am so grateful that everything I could ever want or need is already mine and coming to me at just the right time and in just the right way from my loving and infinite source.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

Plant, animal, and people lover,

David White