A Memory and a Thought about “Nurturing Beauty”

I don’t have a whole lot of memories from when I was in Kindergarten. I remember my teacher, Mrs. Pennington, what the classroom looked like, the paper mache giraffe I made from toilet paper tubes and a shoebox, and the blank white pages at the end of the big books my teacher read to us. She had some silly name for those blank pages but I can’t even remember what that was… something about marshmallows…

And then, I have this one memory about something that happened when I was walking home from school one day. This is one of those memories that has me asking myself, why do I keep remembering that? Now that we are talking about “nurturing beauty”, it keeps coming up again in my mind. So, I thought perhaps I should examine it a little closer.

The walk from the school to my house wasn’t very long, about a block and a half. But when I walked home with this one little friend of mine, we would dilly dally the entire way, examining all that there was to see around us.

The woman who lived across the street from us had the most beautiful rose garden in her front yard, right there next to the sidewalk that we walked on! My friend and I always examined it closely, with great admiration. But, when you’re 5 years old, you really can only walk by something so beautiful and so tempting before you just have to indulge. One day, I picked one of those beautiful roses and brought it home to my mother. She seemed pleased. Pleased, that was, until she found out where I got it from because that neighbor came knocking on the door to tell her that I should not be picking roses from her garden!

Now, my mother wasn’t terribly angry at me. She just simply told me not to pick the neighbor’s roses. I think she thought perhaps the neighbor was being a bit over the top about all this. Yes, in fact, I think I remember getting the sense that this neighbor was no Mr. Rogers. And that made me feel bad. Embarrassed. And mad, too. One little rose when she had all those hundreds of flowers to herself?

I mean, I get it, she probably worked really hard in her garden, putting in hours of energy and care to make it just perfect. And how nice it was that it added beauty to our neighborhood! Definitely don’t need pesky children coming by and picking at it, messing it all up.

Well, here we are 43 years later and someone has replaced her beautiful flower garden with a green lawn. I know because I went back to visit last fall. That little spot of land certainly wasn’t nurturing the same kind of beauty.

I don’t remember this woman’s name, or even her face, but I’m sure someone that put such care into nurturing beautiful flowers had much inner beauty herself, even if she did make me feel bad. Here’s the thing, though– perfectionism, competition, “keeping up with the Joneses”, those things were, and still are, a huge part of the culture in that suburb that I grew up in (and really, in American culture in general). No doubt she had “the best” yard on the block.

I wonder, what if she had noticed my curiosity and wonder about her garden? What if she had befriended me, instead of scolded me, and showed me how to grow those rose bushes with such care? (As Mr. Rogers would have done, no doubt!) What does it really mean to nurture beauty? Is beauty being nurtured when its secrets are not being shared, especially with the next generations? Is perfectionism beauty?

I don’t think perfectionism serves beauty. Perfectionism implies an ending, that something is perfect once it reaches some final state of being. And then what? Perfectionism puts up a boundary to sharing, stopping beauty in its tracks.

I have a rose bush in my front yard now. It was here when I moved into this house. This rose bush is a sad little thing. It gives me a few pretty pink flowers throughout the year, but I really don’t know how to take care of it.

Perhaps this memory from my Kindergarten days keeps coming up because I need to do something with it. In honor of that neighbor long ago, in that far away place, I think I’ll learn how to take care of rose bushes now. And maybe a small child will come by and admire it. I can share the secrets for nurturing beauty with them. I can ensure that the secrets of beauty don’t get lost in perfectionism or in the soil under a green lawn.