What Grows Here
They had butchered the trumpet vines above the café behind my office recently. The tuft of spade-shaped leaves and purple trombones that shaded the steady heat had been razed to dust, leaving only their narrow, woody trunks. Only thing left was the sun scorching through the slatted trellis. The place felt naked. And hot. Just like that, the touch of never-never land in my work space was gone.
But today, just ten days later, I look up at the trellis and admire the new growth, strands of baby vines already half a dozen feet long, reaching up to catch the light. After nearly eight years of living in Sri Lanka, it still amazes me to see how well stuff grows here. Even in dusty, traffic-heavy, diesel-bus-polluted Colombo. Nature is definitely boss on this island, no matter how much we get in its way.
At home, we have a daily practice to stop and smell the flowers on our way to drop off my oldest son at preschool. We pick a tiny jasmine flower, sniff it, then place it in front of our boys’ noses. Every day, my oldest bats away the flower. He’s just grumpy, I keep thinking. But yesterday, when I picked a flower and dropped it into the pool to show him how it would float and spin on the surface, he shouted to me achingly, “Mama don’t do that!” I turned, surprised to see the alligator tears and quivering chin, the complete water works.
II took him in my arms and promised the impossible, that I’d never pick a flower again. But I also wanted to understand. I thought about the Sinhala songs he had learned, the baby books he’d been read about butterflies that need to drink the flower honey. About how we used to go around this same garden and attribute human emotions to the plants. “Does that one look happy? No, not so happy, is it? Look mama, this one looks very happy!” But he couldn’t explain.
Later he told me he’d been taught at school only to take the flowers that had fallen on the ground. I agreed and tried to expand his thinking slightly. That some flowers are grown, just to be picked.
In Buddhist tradition, you offer (picked) flowers to the Buddha when you pray. They are a reminder of life’s fragility. They are once beautiful, and then they die. That’s a lot to think about for a four-year-old, so I think I’ll leave that part for another time.