Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

A Garden of Thorns or of Flowers (a Scrapbook)

“You collect old books, don’t you Jewell?” my friend Janet Mounts said to me not long ago.

“Oh yes, I do. I’m crazy about old books!”

“Then how would you like to see a scrapbook my mother kept when she was young -- way back during the Depression?”

‘‘I’d love it.’’

“It’s not fancy; and it’s not of any real value, except that it belonged to Mother.”

“I’d sure like to see it,” I murmured as Janet talked on.

“It’s about to fall apart. All these years Len and I have been moving around in the Army I’ve, carried it with us, wherever we went. Now, even the box it’s in is wearing out. I think Mother made that scrapbook the year she was so sick the doctor ordered her to stay in bed for months on end. It was something for her to do as she lay there in the bed, worrying about her health and the hard times.

So Janet brought over the tattered scrapbook.

I could scarcely wait to open it up. I was sure that here, at last, would be a true record of that Depression era. It would be chock full of pictures and articles of how dreadful the Great Depression years were. There would be people in rags. People standing in soup lines. People caught up in the drought and the dust storms that swept the West.

And there would be shriveled-up old men sitting on street corners, selling shriveled-up apples.

Not so.

The book is filled with beautiful pictures of flowers and children and birds and gardens, poems on joy and happiness and how to live, many how-to articles and down-to-earth suggestions on things to do for children -- as practical now as they were the day Janet’s mother pasted them in her book more than half a century ago. (Most of the clippings were entered in the late 1920’s and during the spring and summer of 1931.)

The devastating, world-wide Depression and all the misery and despair it brought are not mentioned. It is as if, perhaps, this courageous woman found and saved in the book she was making (as she lay on her bed) those things that would outlast -- and counteract -- the bitter, barren times she and everyone else were experiencing.

For the frontispiece she chose a picture of the Christ, with His followers kneeling before Him in adoration. On the last page she placed a picture of the Cross.

Near the front of the book is pasted this quotation from the German poet and dramatist Goethe:

“‘Tis not as we take it

This mystical world of ours

But as we make it

A garden of thorns or of flowers.”

Janet’s mother chose the garden of flowers, literally and figuratively. She saved dozens of articles on gardening and how to raise such blossoms as “the dahlia, a modern descendant of the gorgeous blooms of the Aztech,” and how and when to plant bearded irises and phlox and blue bells and trailing arbutus and early blue violets, even the wild “Watchman’s Breeches”.

And she folded in a verse titled “Give a Child a Garden”, with lines that say:

“Give a girl a garden, let her tend and care

Something all her very own all the summer there.

Give a boy a garden, sturdy rows of corn,

Lifting up their tasseled heads to the sunny morn.

Give a child a garden ...

It will a lesson be, teaching in the end

Life is all a garden we must watch and tend.”

It is plain from the scrapbook that Janet’s mother loved to dream by the fire, to laugh, to sing, to dance, to hold her little ones close.

Beside a how-article and diagram for a rustic fireplace is this statement: “The open fire warms hearts as well as shins.”

With a baby in a high chair, clutching a big spoon in his fat little fingers, is this quotation from “Baby Mine”:

“When thy little dimpled cheek

Mine is softly pressing,

Not a wish have I to seek

Any other blessing.”

---Alice Carey

Underneath a design for making Christmas tree decorations is a copy of the ageless hymn, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” by Longfellow. Its words ring out: “... the old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet the words repeat of peace on earth, goodwill to man.”

Near all these items are three striking pictures, in colors still bright after all these years: a lovely girl in a pink ball gown, dancing with a clown; two Dutch youngsters frolicking among the tulips; and a child’s playhouse with a cutline that says, “I’ll build my house of this an d that, to suit my pleasure and my cat.”

Radio was a big thing in the late twenties and early thirties. From a Cleveland, Ohio, newspaper’s rotogravure section Janet’s mother clipped full page pictures of radio entertainers Glenn Rowell and Gene Carroll, who then were hailed as ‘‘men who laugh and laugh,” a comedy team that “brightens each day the morale of a city of a million people ... an institution in Cleveland.”

She also saved a poem about radio and the reality of prayer, by Ethel Romig Fuller. It reads:

“If radio’s slim fingers
Can pluck a melody

From night and toss it over
A continent or sea;

If the petaled white notes
Of a violin

Are blown across a mountain
Or a city’s din;

If songs, like crimson roses,
Are culled from thin, blue air,

Why should mortals wonder
If God hears prayer?”

And. there are more poems and more pictures and more thoughts worth thinking.

Janet’s mother made for herself, and for Janet, and for all others privileged to read it, a great treasure. She shows us that we are not to be dismayed in hard times, in illness, or during any other grave misfortune.

In the garden of life we are to find the flowers, despite the thorns.

Printed June 1984, reprinted in the Enterprise Ledger, July 1, 1984.
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