Got A Green Thumb by Dottie Coffman

29 Aug Got A Green Thumb by Dottie Coffman

My mother always grew the most beautiful flowers inside and out of her house wherever she lived.  I remember she used to give me plants to take home thinking she was helping me grow my green thumb.  I would always commit plant-i-cide.  I could kill those plants before the shovel was put in the garage.  Then when she would visit me she would ask “where is that rose bush I gave you?”  I could have said “Mom, that earthquake we had last week destroyed everything.”  Or “the Japanese beetles came through like a plague and ate the whole bush.”  Mom of course knew the truth of the matter.  I had killed it outright.

Living in North Carolina on a dirty road, our house was kind of bare.  One day an elderly woman who walked the dirt road often (and had owned most of it at one time) stopped with two paper bags full of Iris bulbs.  She gave them to me to plant hoping my house would not look so barren.  I planted them; some of them lived, some of them didn’t.  Bless her heart.

After living in Virginia, Texas, North Carolina and Florida before moving to Georgia, the only place I could grow anything pretty was in Florida.  I planted pink impatiens all around our house in South Florida. The more they bloomed, the more I planted.  I was so proud.  And shocked.  I also was able to cultivate a lemon tree, a coconut tree, a banana plant, palm trees and other flowers.  My back deck became my nursery to grow the babies before being transplanted into the earth.  It was wonderful.

So now we live in Georgia; I have a difficult time getting house plants to survive.  Actually the outside is doing well with the live strawberry-like plants, the little purple flowers on the weeds, the dandelions, and the blueberry bushes and grapevines that existed before I moved in.  Weeds can be beautiful.  Blueberries grow by themselves.  And the grapevines crawl everywhere without my help.

Back inside, I have tried to cultivate an African Violet plant given to me some time ago.  I understand Africans are hard to grow but I was determined.  After months, the Violet withered its final leaves and died.  BUT, to my surprise an orchid that I had been given began to bloom and it bloomed and bloomed.  I fed it the three ice cubes a week.  The bloom continued for almost six months before beginning to droop and die.  That’s OK.  Its season is over and I am a proud mama who will keep the bare sticks in the pot watered until the blooms reappear in its next season.

So all this reminds me of Romans 7:15.  The flowers I nurtured the most I tend to kill.  The ones I didn’t pay much attention to flourished.  “I do not understand what I do.  For what I WANT to do, I do not do, but what I HATE, I do.”  Well, you can relate it if you have an imagination.

Dorothy (Dottie) Coffman was born in Washington, DC and raised in Northern Virginia. She married her high school sweetheart, Ken, and after some very dramatic years, they now live in Monroe, Georgia. They have four children: daughter Julie with grandson Noah; Brad (Rhonda) with granddaughter Alexis and grandson Tyler; twin sons Nick (Jen) and Matt (Amy).

Dottie has been involved in many things including: sports, drama and music, radio talk show host and station manager, writing, photojournalism, Bible teacher, public relations, community relations, and more. Being a professional interviewer, a radio personality, and now a writer, Dottie finds that real life is the best subject of all.