Texans deserve true access to our state's wildflowers not just roadside but in great free...
Paul Kramer's field in Washington County is a carpet of color that he opened up to the Mankad family on April 2, 2023. He grew up picking and chopping cotton there during long summers when it belonged to his grandfather.Gazing out the car window at a roadside blanket of bluebonnets is nice, but my mom wanted selfies. She wanted to get up close and personal with theand, like a typical septuagenarian, she wanted documentation, lots of documentation.
To be clear, the flowers aren’t the problem. As soon as we broke past the outer rings of Houston and beyond the gravitational pull of its concrete, the slow roll of hill and dale filled with Indian paintbrush and bluebonnets, buttercups and goldeneye phlox. As we neared the Brazos River, the wildflowers’ intensity only grew.
My wife, Miah, ran out to ask if he’d mind if we took some photos. I’m glad she did. She’s white and grew up in a small town. I couldn’t help but worry that in a rural area people might react differently to me and my brown skin. Then I remembered Leon Hale, who wrote a column for 65 years that appeared first in the Houston Post and then the Chronicle, and how he’d lived his last years somewhere nearby in Washington County. He died at 99 just two years ago. In one of his columns , Hale asked his readers to interpret a recurring dream in which he sits on a porch and looks “out over rolling terrain that has no trees. But it has wildflowers in great profusion.
He shared it with us, and presumably other passersby, for free. He seemed immensely, quietly pleased to be sharing this world with us. We all felt the drunkenness that kind of kindness begets, a little like the feeling of falling in love. My mom called the farmer’s field “a gift from God.” It was a gift, one that shouldn’t be so rare.
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