FLOWERS

I stepped away from the small Lutheran church in Klittzen, Germany where my ancestors worshiped more than 150 years ago. I walked down the narrow street. It was obvious. The poverty resulting from the years when this little village struggled for existence under the harsh rule of the Russians was everywhere evident. The houses were in need of repair. The little country store exuded scarcity. The vegetables looked tired. The little trinkets had lost their luster. Even the lone gray-haired woman who ran the place looked tired beyond her years. When I approached an elderly couple working in their yard, they glanced at me briefly. Then they turned away with an unspoken but obvious message “We don’t want to talk.”

Yet there was something else I could not miss: the flowers. Each home had its own little flower garden. Even in fall there were blossoms everywhere, flowers planted in rows, row by row each with its own species of flowers. I recognized them all, yet to my embarrassment could name virtually none of them.

Flowers. Flowers of the Wends. Flowers of my ancestors. They were never too poor; the season was never so dry that no flowers could be grown. The yearning for the beauty of flowers had to find expression.

I remembered my Grandmother Kieschnick. In the hot arid sands of Lee County, Texas she would raise some flowers, usually in pots arranged on foot-wide board planks along the side of her home. My mother had struggled to raise flowers but the greater need was to plant, tend, harvest and can vegetables by the hundreds of quarts to help us make it through the winter. My older sister Leona keeps the tradition alive. Row upon neat row in all their blooming splendor the marigolds, zinnias, daisies, chrysanthemums - always in bloom. Always a few to cut and place on the table inside.

Flowers. They are as much in my Wendish-Kieschnick genes as any DNA. Nothing can remove or replace those eternal markers of beauty and identity.