Chinese Forget-Me-Not

Chinese forget-me-not (Cynoglossum) is the show-stopper of this late fall season. It's sky blue flowers grab the attention of visitors to my garden. "What's that?" they ask.

I pull up the dead ones and hand the entire plant to my visitor. "Here. You'll have it next year."

Each blue-blue flower turns into a tiny bur of a seed. I often find dozens of them sticking to my pants legs or gloves or shoes. This sort of sticky seed is called a hitchhiker because you can carry it for miles, unaware of your role in the dispersion of this plant.

The word "meme" originally meant a behavior or gesture or manner of speaking that is transmitted by repetition and replication (in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes), such as when you find yourself sounding like your mother or using your good friend's turn of phrase or gesture.

When we clean up our moral act, we can transmit kind and caring words and gestures. And isn't that what we truly want to do? Perhaps especially in our polarized society, where memes of meanness and even cruelty are too often perpetuated.

Forget me not mindfulness.

MY FATHER'S LEGACY

My father died 16 years ago, but today is his birthday, so I'm thinking of him. He had absolutely no

idea about flowers, but, as a farmer, he knew his grasses, something I do not know. He could identify

wheat, rye, oats, and timothy. And he knew alfalfa and the clovers that he cut for hay 3 times every

summer.

His idea of gardening was to plow up a quarter-acre with a small Massey-Ferguson tractor, then put

us kids to work with hoes while he went to jog his harness horses. He himself was not much of a

gardener, having plowed too many fields barefoot with horses during the Great Depression. He liked

to move earth with equipment of any sort.

He did like to grow tomatoes and cucumbers though. That was his idea of a garden, out behind the

horse barn, fertilized with horse manure, and growing plenty of weeds.

Three of his four kids (including me) got the gardening gene. The other one got the mechanical gene.

My father is gone now, but the fruit of his actions lives on. Three of us will be starting tomato

seedlings sometime soon.