May 25, 2008

A Moment In Miss Eula's Magical Garden
a trip of fancy and made-up words.



The bright sun glinted off the bronze bird feeder that gently swayed in a corner of Miss Eula's magical garden. It was Spring sun, the foolin' kind she was apt to say when goaded, but nonetheless it was. The birds that flew over the high fence to graze at the trough were unaware of the metaphorsis that occurred when they passed through the invisible border of plain ordinary black and white mundane everyday sort of you know plainness. The brown, gray, dirty white, tan sorta conglomerated mix and match coverings of their little bodies would when passing over into Miss Eula's world feel more alive, like they had absorbed some magical elixir of contentment, mega doses of Dr. Peppers pepper. Their visage transformed into an inexact sight of sparkling gems, bright, beautiful, but beautiful and pleasing to the eye. The sometimes frenetic chirping transformed into a cohesive choir of such beauty that God's own would be in awe and inspired.

No ordinary tree existed in this garden, although when they were brought to this place they were trees of green and red plumage, undistinguished and well just ordinary. But soon as the spell passed over their ordinariness each green and red leaf transformed from its everydayness to a ready for inspection sparklingly neat recruit standing before his sergeant, shampooed, buffed, spit shinned and eager to be looked at and approved of. It's leaves became a more lustrous, shiny green and/or red perfect in size and shape, each as if individually selected and applied by hand to the strong branches proud of it's leaves like a doting parent loves each of his children.

The trees grew to an exactness in height and girth as if to show off a little, but were in fact shielding or allowing the warm rays of the sun to reach the surface of the garden in just the perfect exposure, not too much so it would dry out the earth or shade too much to inhibit the growth of the seedlings just emerging from beds of soft dark earth, turned and turned again, nourished and nourished again, natures womb as it were readying itself to reproduce replicas of God's moments of showoffiness, a game of oneupmanship, each trying to outdo the other in beauty and grandeur.

Don't expect flowers of red, blue or yellow, but try and visualize red splashes of color from Van Gogh's palette after spending an afternoon mixing and remixing, agonizing over this tone and that addition to create the perfect red, or Turner creating the blue the color of the ocean or the sky at that certain time of day when the contrast is most beautiful, or shades of yellow from Gauguin's brush that most exactly replicates the beaches at high noon in brilliant sunlight.

Miss Eula's garden for all who visit behind the demarcation line of reality and fantasy is comparable to a drug induced trip into colors, smells, sounds, feelings; a place where colors become all encompassing and forever changing, colors becoming solid and feel-able, where the eyes believe you can grab a handful of red or yellow, blue and green and cast it out before you as if you were sowing seed, seed for the soul. It is a place for imagine-ings and imagine-ers, a place to contemplate a moment passed or imagine moments to come, a refuge or a starting place, a place of peaceful thoughts or wanderings, forever changing, forever incomplete, forever beckoning.

How then do we find Miss Eula's garden you ask, and of course the answer is we all have Miss Eula's Magical Garden residing in ourselves. We all have the ability to imagine or fantasize. To think good thoughts, if circumstances are against you, to fictionalize for effect, to just think silly thoughts occasionally to lighten the internal load we sometimes pile upon ourselves, to just find that inner beauty we hopefully all have, whatever the motivation, maybe just for fun. Come visit, Miss Eula's waiting.

(C) copyright 2008 Jim Kittelberger






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