Wisteria

I'm quite lucky because I have a green thumb.  Don't know why, really.  A gift from from my grandma, since my mom can kill an air plant.

Put it in my hands and it will grow thick and satisfied.  Grandma used to say, "Sweet, if -you- stick a broomstick in the ground?, it'd grow.  You got the gift."  Which is saying something because she could grow anything.

 A shot of the wisteria here at Chez Lyn:

Not a very good picture, but a beautiful and happy plant.

I love wisteria because it reminds me of home.  I lived with my grandma for what I consider most of the important years of my life while my parents were elsewhere.  We'd spend time down in Anahuac, at my great-grandparent's home, during the summers.  Anahuac is only about 3 to 5 miles square and back in the day, about 500 in population.  When my grandma married my grandpa and moved to Po-Dunk (pop. 50,000) a lot of her friends snubbed her for "going all town".

Grandma grew up in my great-grandparent's two-room house with no plumbing or running water alongside her 6 brothers and sisters.                                                                                                                        
 The yard included the outhouse, the pig sty, henhouse, tool shed and the smokehouse.

After returning from WWII, my great uncles convinced Mama and Papa to let them install indoor plumbing - although Papa was offended at the idea of 'crapping in my own house.'

I never knew him, all I knew was he was in the Kaiser's Calvary, and deserted to come here with Mama.  He had few skills and worked as a carpenter.  Once for a few years many many babies died, I don't know why;  Papa made little coffins for the 'poor folk', Mama sewed a bit of lining for the coffins.

The outhouse was pulled down but the smokehouse stayed, that was Papa's. Grandma once told me that she remembered at the end of the work week Papa'd bring home his few dollars (sometimes fourteen!) to Mama, but he'd hold back some nickels to buy a couple of cans of beer, which he'd drink in the smokehouse.

By the time I started exploring it (or 'splorin' as I guess I used to say) you could hardly open the door of the smokehouse, it was so decrepit.  The butchering tools and body hooks hung quiet and rusted, glad their days were done.  There was a small window, its panes long gone but the opening thick with purple blooms and lazy gold bees, the poorest man's stained glass.

When my grandma finally decided it was time to pull it down (back in the 80s) she found dozens of decades-old beer cans hidden under the floorboards.

The smokehouse itself was so rotted there really was nothing left of it - the only thing holding it up by then were the fifty-year-old wisterias.

So that's why I like wisteria.