Note to maternal selfie
“Damaging selfie: Student breaks 19th century statue in Milan while taking pic of himself.”
These words caught my eye and, for just a moment, I may have stopped breathing. We live in the midwest, not a sculptural mecca, however we do have someone near and rather dear to us over in Italy right now – our son. A junior in college, he is fortunate enough to be studying in Italy this spring. Although he is based in Rome, my brain buzzed into overdrive trying to recall his schedule, when he was traveling, when were his free days and trying not to focus on that fact that we had lost track of him for nearly a week once already. Ignoring as well the unfortunately timed email I recently sent about, among other things, visiting Milan and encouraging him to take lots of photos! (a family friend had just talked about everything to see in Milan – you can walk to the top of the duomo you know and DaVinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ is in Milan …)
A mom giving her son a nudge to try new things, use ‘fresh eyes’ to see the beauty around him – architecture, paintings … sculpture. And as he is not one to take many pictures and rolls his eyes when I remind him that we want to see him in the pictures too ‘Selfies are a good thing sometimes!’ … I said to him in our last skyping visit.
Part of parenting is truly seeing your child’s individual personality, those traits that are emerging as well as those apparent from almost the moment of birth. And then working to round out and hopefully balance the disposition as they grow and learn how to be a fully responsible adult, a productive member of family and society. Kind of like trimming a young tree so that it grows strong and straight, producing the healthiest fruit possible – so it is when parenting a child. Raising children and raising plants – there are useful similes!
Our son was born with a serious countenance, big eyes that were solemn – there was the sense that he was sizing up everyone around him. This prompted his aunt to blurt out before he was even in my arms “what, were you worrying the whole time he was in there?” So yes, a serious little fellow, and he still leans that direction twenty one years later. Occasionally this maternal gardener feels the need to encourage him to stretch out of his comfort zone a bit. ‘Pay attention to the art that will surround you … please go ahead and take a selfie once in awhile – for me, alright?’
Another very maternal thing occurred soon after catching this news item online:
- a quick hail Mary for my son’s good sense, please God
- another hail Mary for whoever did this – am hoping that it was a moment of colossal bad judgement on the most terribly wrong statue (apparently it was already in need of repair) which can happen … right?
- and then Note to Self: next time use the pruning shears on my own tongue and let the child be!
beauty comes to Centerville
I’ve recently joined the local garden club, not out of any superior gardening knowledge or experience, actually quite the opposite. In fact if there were a gardening club for the lazy, or maybe even one for amazingly slow learners, that would better fit my gardening history. But in spite of my not very green thumb, every spring the same anticipation, even excitement, about digging around in the dirt sprouts, you might say, freshly from within. So because of this, and the interesting members that make up this group, I decided to shelve my sense of horticultural inadequacy and join anyway.
At the last meeting we had a fellow Iowan and wonderful writer Debra Landwehr Engle in to discuss her book: Grace From The Garden – Changing The World One Garden At A Time. It contains vignettes of various gardeners each with a unique message or purpose in their chosen gardening efforts. One of her larger themes is the impact of gardening on the gardeners themselves and how tending a garden can heal and ground a person, maybe even deliver us from ourselves or our circumstances. Ms. Engle has chronicled the stories of fascinating people and gardens from all parts of the US. It’s this larger theme of the ripple effect of creating and caring for a garden that is most intriguing. How we are changed by getting our hands in the dirt; planting, feeding, watering and just watching things grow … even when there is no tangible end product. It’s easier to see the value of gardening when your neighbor brings over a sack of homegrown beefsteak tomatos. The value is less obvious though as you wonder about those bigheaded sunflowers she plants in with her beans and squash or as you watch her devotedly weed those hollyhocks and daisies that crowd around her mailbox … unless you’ve gotten your hands dirty yourself.
This brings to mind the mission of the Centerville Garden Club. Being a new member I am still figuring this out, but I was surprised and very pleased by one of the expressed purposes of this group: plantings in public spaces. While this group of gardeners certainly aims to enrich and encourage individual gardening, it also actively works towards beautifying our small southern Iowa town. New landscaping for the town library, plantings on the square, the courthouse lawn and other common places. And after the planning and planting it falls to the members to water and otherwise care for the plantings to make sure they make it through the heat of an Iowa summer. A largely thankless job for an effort that I think truly blesses the lives of every person living in our community.
It’s tough to put a value on beauty, but the particular beauty found in nature is, I think, a connection with something larger than ourselves. Surely grace is to be found in tending one’s garden, but there is also grace to be gleaned by blossoms in the courthouse beds, color waving in the breeze as we sit at the stoplight, bushes brushed by as we head into the library and in the large lovely pots of color dotting our town square. Beauty catches the eye and can move the soul. It can make people stand up a little straighter and smile for no real reason. Centerville Iowa deserves as much beauty as can be begged, borrowed and yes, even planted.
Ours is a small town in a southern Iowa county not necessarily known for a booming economy, quite the opposite in recent years. Sometimes the modest means of rural towns translates into a picture that can be disheartening. Either overgrown and empty or maybe barren and brown, especially when the Iowa summer sun is slowly baking everything below. To be cared for, nurtured …. towns need to be tended to, not unlike gardens; much the same for people as well. We all need to be touched by beauty.
The Centerville Garden Club knows this through the firsthand experience of it’s members and, much to it’s credit, is quietly cultivating beauty that belongs to us all.
"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. "
edna st.vincent millay
"May priests commit themselves, with prayer and good works, to obtaining from Christ the Eternal High Priest, the grace to shine with Faith, Hope, Charity and the other virtues, and show by their way of life, but also with their external conduct, that they are dedicated without reserve to the spiritual good of the people something that the Church has always had at heart."
shakespeare & company 
