February 2021 – Fleur-de-Blog

I guess it comes from living in a university town, but over the years I’ve listened with envy to women talking about their “book clubs”.

Well, late last year I had the opportunity to join my first book club, and it’s the smartest move I’ve made in a while.

Ours may be a little different. It has a distinct gardening focus with the emphasis on one of our Centre County Master Gardener projects, the Snetsinger Butterfly Garden at Tom Tudek Park. That said, the books we read may revolve around plants and pollinators, but they also touch on issues dealing with race, foster children, relationships, and millennials making their way in life. And in the meantime, our discussions help us see into each other’s hearts, even over Zoom.

On Valentine’s Day we tackled The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, a riveting novel tied in a bow with Victorian floriography, communicating by code using flowers. Most the time our “homework” is simply reading the assigned book, but for this month’s meeting, we also shared our favorite flower. Mine was lavender:

The first time I met lavender, I was working for a landscape designer, weeding gardens in the Lehigh Valley. After a day of work at the home of a CEO, I told my boss that I should be paying the CEO and his wife to be able to work around such a fragrant drift of plants.

The Victorians and The Language of Flowers say lavender is a symbol of mistrust.

Blame it on Cleopatra. The story goes that a poisonous snake struck and killed Cleopatra. It was hiding under a lavender plant.

Lavendula is a member of the mint family, with 47 species. Lavender repels insects and deer yet it provides nectar for bees. For humans, it is a flower and an herb that delights all five of our senses.

Sight: After a trip to Provence, fields of undulating rows of blooming lavender are etched in my mind.
Touch: The velvety buds on the flower stalk or in a bath-salt infusion fill you with calm and wash away your cares.
Smell: The fragrance of the purple-blue flowers and gray foliage shares a heavenly scent throughout the three seasons of the Pennsylvania garden. And by weaving a lavender wand, you can brighten the winter blues for years.
Sound: I needed help on this, and Lyrics.com provided assistance. “Lavender,” the site reports, is found in the lyrics of 317 songs. Dating back to 16^th century England is the “Lavender’s Blue (Dilly Dilly)” lullaby. Centuries later Frank Sinatra crooned of giving his father “a most lovely lavender tie” (ok, that’s the color not the plant but I love listening to old lavender eyes) and The Kinks rocked out to wanting to live on “Lavender Hill.”
Taste: There’s lavender honey, lavender tea and lavender kombucha, lavender scones, and my favorite, a culinary memory from a courtyard café in Ghent—toasted country bread with a smear of goat cheese, sprinkle of lavender buds, and a drizzle with honey.

Trust this: Refinement, grace, purity, serenity, calmness … unforgettable lavender. Laurie Lynch

Bookworms Unite: The other books we’ve read so far are The Language of Butterflies by Wendy Williams, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver and A Honeybee’s Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes. I recommend them all.

There’s a To Read stack of books under my bedside table. I finished my library book so I grabbed one from the stack: Peace Is Everybody’s Business, Half a Century of Peace Education with Elizabeth Evans Baker.

I’m not sure where the book came from but I decided to dive in.

The trouble started immediately, Chapter One. A Peace Chapel in Huntingdon, PA, a mere 30 miles from here? And I’ve never heard of it?

The plot thickens. The open-air Peace Chapel was designed by landscape architect Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam War Memorial, and I’ve never heard of it?

Heck, Huntingdon is just over Pine Grove Mountain. I was born and raised in Central PA, went to college here, left for about five years, returned for about 10, left for about 20, and returned—and I’ve never heard of Maya Lin’s Peace Chapel?

I was embarrassed but determined. I quickly Googled Peace Chapel Huntingdon, PA and the first mention I saw said, “Off Warm Springs Avenue near Juniata College.” Zip Code for Huntingdon, 16652.

Sure, we just had a foot of snow, but the roads are clear. I have nothing planned for the day. So, I hop in the car with my trusty polar bear pup, press NAV on the dashboard monitor, type in the info, and off we go, looking for adventure and a peaceful connection.

I make a few wrong turns (Siri and I sometimes have communication issues) but we finally get to an open gate that looks like it might be the right place. The road is plowed, the gate open, so we venture on. We pass a construction yellow Komatsu excavator frozen in time near some bleachers. Up we go. A huge pale blue water tank. A cell tower encased in chain-link. Up we go. Finally, a field of boulders surrounding a gigantic American flag on a flagpole with four spotlights on 20’-high aluminum poles around that. (I later read the flag is the largest in Huntingdon, 20’x38’.)

We park the car and walk around. I keep saying, “This can’t be it. This can’t be it. This isn’t a place of peace.” We circle. And circle, walking on the muddy road around the boulders and flagpole. “This can’t be it.”

We get in the car. I go back to the NAV button and type in Peace Chapel. Peace Chapel Lane comes up. “Yes!” I make my selection and off we go.

We drive and drive, and finally come to Peace Chapel Lane. We turn and pull into a driveway. I can see the unplowed lane, a closed gate. Yes. The Peace Chapel still exists. It’s just snowed in and we’re snowed out.

When I get home, I call my friend Jo who grew up in the Huntingdon area. She had never heard of the Peace Chapel either so I’m feeling a little better. She Googles it and knows exactly where it is, above Juniata College. “We’ll go in the spring,” she assures me.

“But, where was I?” I ask Jo, describing the boulders and flag and water tank.

“Oh, you went to Flagpole Hill. That’s where the girls with ‘reps’ went in high school.”

Hmm, wrong side of the mountain. Well, I did see the biggest Stars and Stripes in all of Huntingdon … Time to get back to my reading. Perhaps I am trying too hard to make a connection. I’ll wait until the thaw. Connections happen in their own time.

I notice a WhatsApp from my sister Patty Ann in Lima, Peru. It is a link to a virtual painting class she and her daughter Serenella took. One painting by Patty Ann is of a red bird and Serenella painted a beautiful pink protea blossom. Within the past few days, I took photos of a cardinal at our snowy feeder and a protea blossom on the atrium table. Two opposite hemispheres and seasons, but we still connect.

Punxsutawney Phil prognosticated six more weeks of winter—but I was eating groundhog cookies nevertheless. The holiday slipped my mind this year until I got a package in the mail. It was sent from Maryland. A former clerk in my mom’s store, Nancy, has kept The Country Sampler tradition going in her own circle. This year, with warm memories of my mother, she expanded her circle and sent my sisters and me each a box of homemade (using COVID precautions) groundhog cookies.

And in another direction, spring is in the air in Belgium. First, Marina sends a photo of her almond tree blossoms. (I wasn’t too jealous.) Then, she reports finding her first slug of the season in her rooftop garden. (Serves her right, getting spring temperatures in February.) Well, these things come in threes. She and Koen went for a walk at a nearby park and she smelled something reminiscent of her childhood. There, in the Ghent park, was a Kentucky coffeetree. Its long, brown pods were littering the ground, decaying, and smelling like the pods of the Kentucky coffeetrees that grew next to the shop on Hottenstein Road. Connections. And tears, but peace too. Laurie Lynch