While weeding the courtyard garden I bumped up against the very large leaves of the Thunderbolt hosta that grows under the Japanese maple tree. I manged to take a good chunk out of one of the leaves so I cut it off the plant. The shredded leaf, though my fault, marred the perfect look of the plant's shape.
Then another leaf, this really big one, was shading part of the daylily right behind the hosta. So I cut it off and laid it aside. This size of the leaf, separated from the main plant, surprised me.
Later, in the house, I put the leaf -- dulled with soil and marked with bird droppings -- into the kitchen sink and gave it a bath. It took on personality. Shining surface, ridges like plow furrows, tracings like roads on a map -- the hosta glowed with character.
It takes some kneeling at the growing level of a plant to see these things. Down on the ground I find greens and yellows that are not apparent from overhead. Up close, the plant has a magnificent countenance.
It is like that with people, too. When we look at each other in new ways, things surprise us. It shouldn't take a big hosta leaf to remind me of that, but then, sometimes it does.
Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler
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