The Lotus Flower

Several years ago I bought some Lotus Flower plants from Lowes’s Water Garden for my KOI ponds. Sometimes during the summer we get these absolutely beautiful flowers. They only last for a few days, but when they bloom, it is something to see and appreciate. I finally got the courage to see if my skills are sufficient now to do a painting of one. There is so much color in the flowers that it would be easy to over do it and make a mess. The honey bees also love these flowers. In one of my photos of the flowers there was a honey bee on it, so I put the bee in this painting. That bee brought back the memories.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was Oscar O. Saunders. By the time I knew him when I was a little kid he was a bee-keeper and sometime house-painter living in the tiny village named Knippa, Texas. We lived in Uvalde, Texas, about eleven miles away. This little town of Knippa had a little one-room post office, a country store, a few little churches, a dance hall and several hundred people living in little houses on about a dozen dirt streets on the north side of the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. My grand parents, several uncles, aunts and cousins lived on the last dirt street on the north side of town.

Grandpaw and Grandma Saunders lived in a four-room house with a little front porch and a screened-in back porch. When I was about ten years old, I got to stay them a lot during the hot summer months. In the vacant lot to the east of their house, Grandpaw had a rose garden. On the other side of the house were a lot of his bee hives. So bees were everywhere and often on us. After a while, you get used to a bee crawling on you and you just brush it off. If you didn’t fight them most of the time they wouldn’t sting you. Out back he had a barn, a honey processing hut and an outdoor privy. We boys were not allowed to use the bathroom in the house, we had to use the outdoor privy.

We had to be careful using this privy because there were a lot of spiders in it, some of which were the dreaded and poisonous black-widow with their red hour-glass marking on their bellies. The most nervous part of this concern was that when using the privy, there are certain parts of the anatomy that are exposed below the hole in the seat. Therefore, it was very important to check to see if any of these black spiders were under the seat near the hole. This was not an idle concern, one of my friends when using an outdoor privy on a ranch down near Batesville, was bitten by a black widow in the most inopportune location for a boy. His dreadful experience was always on my mind when I would open the privy door. On the plus side, last year’s Sears and Roebuck catalog was always there on the seat. The pages that had not been used made for good reading.

I remember the first time I stayed with them, before bedtime Grandpaw told me hair-raising story after story of hunting panthers and bears in West Texas. Filled with his stories I went to bed. Sometime during the night, I woke up hearing the most awful snarling and growling. I was so scared, I could not move. The next morning at breakfast, I told Grandma that I had heard some panthers last night. She looked at me, then smiled and said “Yeah, when Oscar gets to snoring it does sound kind of like two panthers fighting over something.”

Something did happen in that little house one moon-lit night that was real and perhaps one of the most frightening experiences of my life. The bed I was sleeping on was next to and up close to the window on the rose garden side of the house. This was in the days before air conditioning and it was a hot summer night so the windows were open. Something woke me up from a deep sleep. My face was about six inches from the screen wire in the window. The full moon was low over the rose garden. Slowly the image of a man appeared among the rose bushes. He slowly walked straight to my window. Since the full moon was behind him, all I could see was the black outline of the man. When he reached my window, he put a hand on each side of the window and looked in the window. He leaned over until his face was just inches from my face. I could hear him breathing. I don’t know if I have ever had a more fearful moment. I was frozen with fear. Suddenly and without a sound, he vanished and then there was just moonlight on the rose garden.