About a decade and a half ago, I was living in a really tiny apartment in a run-down old house. It had once been a really nice house in a very nice neighborhood, but at some point it was somewhat thoughtlessly chopped up into four or five apartments, and years of rentals to college kids had only made the place seedier. This was an apartment I'd found at the last moment when my original choice didn't work out, and my efforts to find other places didn't work. At the last minute I found this place listed in a free newspaper, and within two hours I'd signed a lease. At the time I couldn't have known about the frat boys who would move into the master suite downstairs, who would whoop and holler at basketball game broadcasts or play Oasis at top volume or park their truck on the front lawn or leave their black lab chained to the front porch, where it would crap all over the lawn (leaving land mines that I stepped in at least once).
This was also a year I was going through some issues. I don't want to call it "post-traumatic stress," but I'd spent the summer fighting a lingering illness that didn't get resolved until the summer was almost over. It had left me shaken and wondering if any little thing I'd notice was a sign the illness was about to return. I had also rolled the dice in my academic career, forsaking my original intent of graduate education in history in exchange for a master's in journalism, so there was some anxiety there as well.
I did what I could to make my apartment better. I put in a new light fixture on the ceiling fan, because the previous occupants had busted the old one. I replaced the old hard-wired phone jacks with modular units. I replaced the dreary, dilapidated old roll-down window shades with new sets of blinds, and hung draperies on the windows. I put nice framed posters on the walls and put an inexpensive but neat rug for the floor. I did some things that may have violated the lease terms, but the landlord never called me on it, and if anything, what I did added to the value of the place.
Everything I did, though, couldn't take away from the fact it was a sad house, and there were times I felt sad and trapped and frustrated in it. It was a charming neighborhood, but I hated the downstairs tenants. I dreamed of buying the house and bringing it back to its glory and beauty, but I also wanted to be back in the country. There was a farm house up on a hill that I'd pass on the two-hour drive to and from my hometown; it sat by itself, surrounded by all this farmland, and it had this long, screened-in passageway along one side, going from one end to the other. I'd see that house each week and wish I had the money to buy it and fix it up, because it looked like a place I could be so happy. It seemed like everything this little efficiency apartment in this sad house wasn't.
But I had to make the best I could of what I had, for the time being. One night, on my weekly grocery run, I noticed the floral section of the grocery store had bunches of wildflowers for $5 or so. I found some that looked pretty and added them to my cart. Back at the apartment, I got a tall glass out of the cabinet and filled it with water (I didn't have a vase), put the flowers in the glass, and set them on the kitchen counter by a window.
It's impossible to say how much that little bundle of flowers, that little glass full of life, brightened up that dreary little apartment. And each week, I'd buy new flowers and do the same thing. The window where the flowers lived was along one side of the apartment, the side from which I approached when I'd drive up or walk up, and seeing those cheerful flowers up in the window gave me hope. In the midst of so much that was hopeless, there was a quiet little island of life and beauty. Somewhere I have a picture I took of the flowers in that window, and you can see they're the most hopeful thing in the frame.
A couple years later I was watching an old, old episode of Sesame Street on the now-gone Noggin network. While I didn't grow up with Sesame Street (my initial exposure to the Children's Television Workshop was through the original Electric Company, which we watched in my second grade class; my only exposure to Sesame Street came when I was spending the day with my grandmother when she was taking care of younger kids, and as a second grader I deemed it fare for children), I did enjoy watching those old episodes because it was such a different program way back then, and it did bring back a few memories. But the episode I happened to catch that night included this little film piece, which made me immediately stop what I was doing and watch. I believe it was the first time I'd ever seen it, and as I watched those pictures of that little flower set to that achingly beautiful music, it would not let me go. What I wasn't prepared for was the twist at the end, when you find out that little piece of beauty that you'd assumed was in some garden or wilderness was actually growing quietly and all alone atop a building in a grimy, busy city.
Even 11 years later I find it difficult to write about it without getting misty-eyed, and I've had to stop typing a time or two. Is it a sad story because the poor flower is a little miracle of nature that sits alone, unloved and unappreciated in a sea of concrete? Or is it instead a story of hope because in spite of everything humans have done to build and create and pave over and smog up and generally destroy the world around us, Nature's beauty will always find a way to hold on, and there will always be something beautiful and inspiring where you least expect it?
Maybe it's my years of surviving various things and my inability to give up, but I've always believed and hoped it was the latter. And maybe, just maybe, it's from a memory of how a $5 spray of wildflowers in the window of a ratty upstairs apartment a decade and a half ago helped give me hope when so much around me seemed so bleak.