Flower Full Kitchen Window
Two observations book-ended my day. One was this morning when entering the kitchen I noticed four flowers in the middle of our window ledge at various stages of bloom. You might not know that spring is coming from the cold temperature outside, but the kitchen window knows it, and is flower full. The kitchen window is the only part of our heated house that gets a good dose of sun. (The sunroom is unheated by the house heating system.) So most of plants in the rest of the house are green and grow without much sunlight, but the flowers in the kitchen window are where the color is. Just as the sun, flowers brighten our spirits.
The other observation was tonight when my adult son and I went to visit a friend in the House of Correction, the county correctional jail facility. County jails have become the new mental health facilities for poor persons. The largest mental health facilities in the country are county jails, with the L.A. county jail holding the largest number of persons with mental illnesses in the USA. Our friend is a good adult who happens to have an illness that when untreated gets him into trouble. The last time he acted out, threatening suicide, he was taken to the county mental health hospital. However, after a few days when he started to get a little better he was taken to jail for a probation revocation. The previous occurrence was for a time he acted out in a police station after being arrested unjustly. The treatment in jail for mental health is poor. This person is the one who helped me start the home Growing Power model and is a person who needs treatment, not prison.
The House of Correction is a dark, dreary place. The waiting room is full of families of persons in the jail. A lady in the line behind us told us her son, like most of the prisoners, including our friend, was denied the medicine he needs and has had court dates postponed 14 times. After an hour she finally got to front of the line only to be told she could not visit since it was the wrong day for persons with her son’s last name. The wait for justice is long and hard.
This place was flowerless. Young children waiting to see their father, brother or uncle provided the only joy. In their innocence and unawareness of what the treatment was at this place, they had joy. They made this flowerless place a little more bearable at least for those waiting to visit.
Coming home tonight I took another look at my flower full kitchen window ledge and said a prayer of thanksgiving. “Where have all the flowers gone…a long time waiting.”
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