Digressions: My Life in 500 Words or Less

One of the yuccas my dad planted in front of our home in Radcliff.

Our yucca in the backyard.

"... What might simply appear to be one thing to one person takes on an entirely different significance to another."

A week or so ago, Rebecca informed me our yucca was in bloom. It grows in the shade of a black walnut tree in our back yard.

Like many things in our lives, what might simply appear to be one thing to one person takes on an entirely different significance to another. Any random person passing by would see a flowering plant, might even admire the tiny white elongated petals in lateral lines along the vertical stem and sprouting from its short branches.

But they wouldn’t see the house almost 15 miles away where such yuccas lined the edge of a well-trimmed front lawn. They wouldn’t see the careful hands that worked the soil and planted those yuccas. They wouldn’t see the man with the concentration lines on his brow under the straw hat who pulled the weeds from around the circular beds that held those plants.

They wouldn’t see my father.

But I do.

Every time I see a yucca, I see dad. Dad liked those plants so much he maintained a number of them in meticulous displays in his yard. The one in my yard grows at a slant at the base of the black walnut tree.

Some years ago, when he was still alive, dad gave me that yucca.

Each year when it sprouts and blooms, it is like fragmented images of my life elbowing their way to the front of my mind. It makes me think of dad.

It turns the yucca into something else for me.

It transforms the plant into memory.