Blog 3637 – 10.18.2025

Bloom

This Thursday past my wife and I headed from our mid-week getaway in Bon Wier, Texas to do a couple of loads of laundry at The Wash Tub laundromat in nearby Newton, Texas, yet all the working washing machines were occupied so we drove twenty five more miles to the next nearest laundromat, The Missing Sock, in DeRidder, Louisiana. We had already had our breakfast, still after loading the clothes into the washers (dark clothes in one, light in the other) we decided to walk a couple of blocks to The Donut Palace for a donut for Linda. She is a Shipley’s Donut fan while I have been a fan of Krispy Kreme donuts since I was a little boy growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

What we saw outside a business on our short walk made the unplanned detour to DeRidder even more worth it than the donut, a Scarecrow Fall display with the word Bloom written on five pumpkins.

We are not here to complain, to be disappointed, or depressed, but to bloom. As the Unitarians say, “Life is meant to be good.” A song from my youth says, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.” And a famous poem also says, “God hath not promised skies always blue, flower strewn pathways all our lives through…” and yet as I look back on my almost seventy-five year adventure in time and space there have always been flowers to cheer me along the way. From the first time, as a wee lad, I went searching for wild flowers to pick for my Mom for Mother’s Day and all the bouquets that I have picked for the girls and ladies that I have wanted to impress throughout my life, there have always been flowers.

Some of you macho men may think me less of a man when I confess how very much I love flowers. Flowers to me are like lovely ladies making the whole world a more beautiful and sweeter smelling place. We men have far too often done our worst trying to make a stinking mess of it. But, flowers give the artist in me hope.

The last stanza of one of my favorite songs, Starry, Starry Night (Vincent) goes:

The bloom of flowers and the bloom I see in lovely ladies and even a few smelling guys caused me to hope and that hope made me change the very last line in my karaoke version of the song to: “Perhaps someday they will.

Your friend, fellow traveler, and connoisseur of flowers,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J6W6kC4gHNSMXCToLV67Gy9eX98gtA-E/view?usp=drivesdk

Starry Starry Night (Vincent)