Blog 3488 – 05.22.2025
Flowers
My mother loved flowers and I loved my mother. From those first bouquets of wild flowers that I picked for her for Mother’s Day and more often as a small boy and all the wild flowers that I have picked throughout my life, my eye has always been drawn to pretty ladies and pretty flowers.
I have for years cultivated flowers in my yard and over the course of my almost seventy-five years I have purchased more that a few red roses and other flower arrangements for the lovely ladies in my life. I even once bought a bouquet of long stem red roses for my macho dad and sent them to his work (He was a Teamster and concrete mixer driver.) I heard him say for years, ‘Send me my flowers while I am alive.” He quit quoting those words after he got that particular birthday gift.
I have a lot of respect for professional floral arrangement and the adage “Say it with flowers” is one I adhere to often, still there is a special appeal to me in wild flowers. A line that comes to me often is, “He (or she) shall have flowers wherever he (or she) goes.” I count on that promise and am always on the lookout to be surprised by the beauty of flowers offering their blossoms like a special “I love you” from above.
In the book store of the Bible College that I attended as a young man I saw a poster once that was a close-up photograph of a lovely daisy in full blossom. Above the flower was printed one word: “Beautiful!” and below the flower in answer to the that exclamation, a five word response : “I know, I made it.”
I was a Boy Scout for a year, my eleventh year to be exact, and I remember selling packages of flower seeds to earn enough credits to get a back pack in which to carry my gear on camping trips in the wild woods. All you Johnny Appleseed types might think fruit and vegetables seeds are more practical as some might say are technical and business courses are over studies in the arts, humanities, religion, and philosophy.
It does not have to be either/or but can be both. And in my estimation flowers play an important role in the unmatched beauty that they add to life.
May you indeed have flowers wherever you go.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White
John Denver: Today
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