Sidewalk Flower Garden
I labeled the photograph “Hutchinson sidewalk flower garden” because this was the front walkway into our house and my mother put most of her flower efforts into this double sided entrance. This was also the location where any guest who came to visit posed for their photo taken by my mother with her polaroid land camera. It was the standard backdrop at the Hutchinson household.
One of my Dad’s best friends back in the nineteen sixties was a Wesleyan minister from Canada whose last name was, and I’m not kidding, Moses. That would be Mr. Moses to me, since I was only seven or eight years old at the time. If you’re going to be a preacher you can’t improve much on that one. His first name was Joe and his wife was Fran. They posed in the Hutchinson sidewalk flower garden every time they visited. What also intrigued me about Mr. Moses was seeing him on TV at the time running for president of the United States against a guy named Richard Nixon. Joe Moses looked and sounded just like Hubert H. Humphrey! To me they were one and the same person. I did find it strange that our very Republican household had a Democrat pose so often in our sidewalk flower garden. The only political oriented social event I ever remember in our house growing up was the night of the 1968 presidential election returns. Dad cooked a large pot of oyster stew and Mom and Dad had some friends over. I sat on the couch and watched Mr. Moses lose the election while everyone else in the room pulled for the other guy.
Mr. Moses and his wife Fran kept coming back over the years and I eventually figured out Hubert Humphrey was actually from Minnesota and not Canada. Mr. Moses became the minister of the Wesleyan Church in Calais, Maine and served there for many years. When I think of Joe’s wife Fran I remember her love of flowers. She was always interested in my mother’s garden and she would sometimes bring flowers as a gift. There was a simple elegance in her manner and her love of beauty.
Emerson once said that, “Beauty is its own excuse for being.”
Beauty just is.
Words do not add anything to it.
If we are open to beauty. It is there.
No matter where you look.
No matter who you are talking to.
No matter what you are doing.
In this elegant simplicity life opens to us.
In this open space the things that used to separate me from you are no longer there.
Political views, religious views, philosophic views no longer distance me from you.
Beauty is the clear opening where what we share in common is evident.
When we experience that, I think we have it.
What else is there?
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Dave