Butterfly & Rhubarb

Butterfly at Ginter Garden

Today I went out on a short walkabout, the first time in months! My rusty old body creaked and groaned and protested but I prevailed! A few of us went to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden for a walkabout and lunch. The gardens aren’t in full bloom now but we enjoyed ourselves. In parts of the gardens there were small signs with “thought prompts.” One was “Think of a plant you admired when you were young.” And so I did.

When I was young and lived near the school football field on Illinois Avenue in Huron, SD, our neighbors next door, the Kupers, were pretty cool, or at least they were fun. He was retired and old and wrinkled. He smoked Camel straight cigarettes and would tell us kids funny stories; we laughed and laughed and laughed with him. And then to end it all, he’d take his LIT cigarette and somehow curl it in his tongue and take the whole thing into his mouth. Smoke would come out of his nose and then his mouth would open, his tongue would uncurl, and voile, the cigarette was there, still on fire. Amazing.

In their backyard, right next to the fence, was a garden and in the garden was rhubarb. A lot of rhubarb. He would say, “Come on, let’s have a stalk of this, it’ll make your mouth shrink!” And it did. I loved it. He told me that I could have a little each week, he still had to have some for canning or pies or something but I could help myself to a stalk or two when it was hot. And I did. So today, seventy years later, Mr Kuper still lives on in my head every time I eat anything with rhubarb and when I think of plants around me as a kid.

The blue and black butterfly is from Ginter Gardens. Patience was the key in getting this shot. The blue butterfly reminds me of the Morpho butterfly in “The Big Door Prize” TV series.