Growing Morning Glories – Remembering My Grandmother’s Garden – Memoir Monday – Joy Comes in the Morning & Thomas Wolfe: Some Things Will Never Change

For weeks, I have watched my morning glory vines as they have slowly and tediously twisted themselves into glorious blue tapestry that has woven itself around my garden.

Morning Glory Vines at the Back of My Garden – July 15, 2024

During the early part of summer, I praised my morning glory vines as they climbed along the fences around my back lawn. Because I wanted to obscure the view of my neighbor’s house, I spread the seeds especially thick this year, and the vines around my yard have provided privacy for me, this entire summer. And yet, as month after month, I saw nothing more than masses of green vines, I began wondering if my plants would ever bloom.

Jacki Kellum Garden October 24, 2021

For many years, I have religiously sowed morning glory seeds in my gardens every spring, and those seeds have never failed to produce, and yet, by early September, I always begin to wonder if this will be the year that my seeds will fail to become beautiful flowers. “Ah! Ye of Little Faith!”

I am working on a book, and I plan to title that book: Lessons from My Garden. One lesson that my garden teaches me over and over and over is the nature of faith.

What Is Faith?

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1

Faith, by its very definition, is believing that something will happen that you simply cannot see will happen [with your human eyes]. When for weeks, my morning glory vines failed to turn on the blue this year, my faith waivered. If I had seen the promise of blooms, my belief in future flowers would not be faith. Faith defies human sight.

Because I grew up in the church, much of my circumspecition becomes religious, and in yet another period of my own lack of faith, I am reminded of the faultering writer of Lamentations, who questioned God’s mercy, only to be reminded: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

“Because of the Lord’s great love
we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
²³They are new every morning;
great is Thy faithfulness.” Lamentations 3: 21-23

I often quote Thomas Wolfe, who said: “You Can Never Go Home Again,” and in many ways that is true.

The little town where I grew up has shriveled and has almost completely succumbed to the ravages of time and neglect. Once-thriving business are boarded shut. The town is a skeleton. I can’t return to my hometown. It is no longer there.

But if that were not true–if the town itself had not evaporated–my parents and my grandparents have died–they are no longer where I grew up, and most of my friends have moved away. The people in my town have radically changed.

Like the people of my church Are my church, the people of MY town Are my town. The people who lived where I grew up are no longer there.

Thomas Wolfe is correct: “You can never go home again.”

But as it turns out, Thomas Wolfe also wrote:

“Some Things Will Never Change.”

“Some things will never change.
Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen [to]:

The voice of forest water in the night,

a woman’s laughter in the dark,

the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel,

the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows…’

The glittler of sunlight on roughened water,

the glory of the stars,

the innocence of morning

the smell of the sea in harbors

“All things belonging to the earth will never change–

the leaf,

the blade,

the flower

the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again

the trees whos stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark

the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth–

all things proceeding from the earth

to seasons

all things that lapse and change and come againg up on the earth–

“these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever.

“Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.”

From p. 40 of Signet Edition of Thomas Wolfe‘s You Can’t Go Home Again – (1940):

_____________________________

Every spring, I sow morning glory seeds in hope of a blanket of blue every autumn. And Every year, I eventually wonder when and if my seeds will produce flowers. And yet, they always do.

Regardless of my lack of faith,

Some Things Never Change:

“The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows…. the glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors…” Thomas Wolfe

By the grace of God, I have survived another week, and once again, it is Memoir Monday.

Today, I’ll share that my grandmother is the reason that I sow morning glory seeds every year.

When I was a child, my house was behind my grandmother’s house–only a gravel road and an alley away. Every day of my childhood, I journeyed from my front door to my grandmother’s back door–at least twice a day.

My grandmother planted a massive stand of hollyhocks at the back of her property, and as soon as I reached the hollyhocks on my childhood jaunts, I felt safe.

If only for a minute or two, I would crawl into the thicket of massive plants and swaddle myself with blooms. I called this My Hollyhock House.

My grandmother was a simple German lady who had a true Cottage Garden. From the hollyhocks, I would meander through her morning glories, her irises, her poppies, her snapdragons, and all the other flowers she grew. By the time I reached my grandmother’s back door, I felt that I had reached the gates of heaven. I wrote a poem about that experience:

Calico Cotton
by Jacki Kellum

I’ve reached the shore of my grandmother’s door,
The one from the garden, inside.

Oh, sunny-sweet back room
Of my grandmother’s loom,

The place in the dirt
Of my grandmother’s skirt,

In your warm summer lap,
Hold me tight; I will nap,

On my grandmother’s porch,
Let me hide.

My grandmother’s wringer washer tubs rested on her back porch, and they were covered by a skirt that she had sewed from blue calico cotton. That is one reason that I named my poem “Calico Cotton.” The other reason has to do with the fact that I grew up in a small, rural community that was surrounded by cotton fields.

Unlike me, my grandmother was a wonderful housekeeper. She had probably washed, starched, and ironed the calico skirt cover on her porch 1,000 times; and my grandmother’s porch smelled like freshly laundered sheets that had been hung out to dry on a sunny-fresh clothesline.

Some Things Never Change:
Every time I look at my patch of blue morning glory blooms, I return to the safety of the calico gardens of my grandmother’s back yard.

As I write this, I am aware that many of my readers did not grow up in church and yet, somehow, most of us manage to survive doubt and depression. Gardening is a way that I rise above depression, and nature, in general, has the same, uplifting power over me.

Your Memoir Monday Assignment Today is to Write about the Ways that You Are Able to Survive Self-Doubt and the Blues. Today, I celebrate my blue morning glories and memories of my grandmother–as ways that I survive myself.

“Bright Blue Bugles
Blow Bonny Bubbles
Into Morning Moonlight,
Just at Dawn.” – Jacki Kelum

In realizing that morning glories bloom in the morning, I offer the following:

Psalm 30

Joy Comes in the Morning

¹I will exalt you, Lord,
    for you lifted me out of the depths
    and did not let my enemies gloat over me.
²Lord my God, I called to you for help,
    and you healed me.
³You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead;
    you spared me from going down to the pit. …
weeping may stay for the night,
    but joy comes in the morning. …
Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me;
Lord, be my help.”

¹¹You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
¹²that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.
Lord my God, I will praise you forever. Psalm 30: 1-5, 10-12

Free Garden Plan with Morning Glories

I’ll post this again in spring, but here is a great little garden plan that includes a teepee on which you can grow morning glory flowers next year:

How to Grow a Children’s Sunflower Garden

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Jacki Kellum