Blog 2133 – 08.18.2022

Mexican Petunias

A year ago our sweet and lovely redheaded sister Sarah gave my wife and I some Elephant Ear plants and some plants she called Mexican Petunias. She was cleaning up the yard of the house she had raised her children in to sell it and purchase a one story home closer to her two children who live in the Houston area. We planted them in our back yard and enjoyed almost immediately how lush the Elephant Ear plants grew, but the Mexican Petunia must not have adjusted as quickly to being transplanted and only recently, a year later bloomed for us. But, their lovely blooms were well worth the wait.

I am out of town on my last away work assignment in Nebraska so my wife sent me pictures so I would not miss these Mexican beauties. I find it remarkable how many Texas cowboys think the Mexicans are late comers when it is the cowboys who were the late arrived, later even that the Spanish who arrived more than thousands of years after the First People had settled and stewarded the great state that today we call Texas.

I heard a cowboy lament in a country western song that the west was getting too crowded and that it was “time for some folks to go back where they came from” and I remarked that must be the same song that the Native Americans sang. The historians who have examined the evidence say that we are all immigrants that came from somewhere else, the later waves of immigrants supplanting the first and believing that the land was theirs by divine right to do with as they pleased. The First People believed the earth was their mother and the sky their father and that they they were set here to tend this garden for their divine parents. Their Garden of Eden story lasted over a ten thousand years instead of the much shorter time of Adam and Eve’s garden tale in the Bible story. Same ending though, Ego ends up messing it up for everyone.

A popular song from several years back seems to sum up the goal of the so called entrepreneurs immigrants:

I am so glad and grateful that even concrete and asphalt cannot keep paradise a prisoner forever and that there are cracks in Ego’s plan to pave paradise and put up a parking lot or as a recent fortune cookie fortune reads: “And unexpected event will soon make your life more exciting.”

That clock looks like it was painted by a child, a baby, and it was – me. I like primary colors.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White