Joyanna Adams

A Garden of Evil and Good

Nobody Remembers

It’s a Saturday night. Here in St. Louis, it’s still cold. Spring is everywhere, baby birds are being born, rabbits are nibbling on the grass, the moon now shines beneath the newly baby born green leaves.

And I had two thoughts going through my head tonight: The smell of my grandmother’s gardenia bushes in the backyard of her Naples, Florida home when I was a kid, and the Jews, being lined up near their own graves, and being shot to fall into the pits.

That image is forever etched in my brain. None of them fought back.

The joy of life, the horror of life, existing right next to each other.

Is it any wonder man reached out for a God?

While comparing the miracle of smell, to the horror of murder, is it any wonder that each of us wants to remember our favorite smell? Pumpkin pies cooking in the oven at Christmas. The smell of fresh air after a summer storm. The smell of a baby’s little hand, as you kiss it while it’s grasped around your big finger. Men remembering their lover’s perfume. Women remembering the smell of their husband’s sweat in bed,

The smell of your lover’s sex on your hands.

When I was older, I went to see my grandmothers’s house. Someone had bought it. I stood in front of it, and SWORE that I smelt that gardenia bush in the backyard.

It was just my brain fooling me. It had been long gone.

They say dogs can smell cancer. I believe that’s true.

And for the last week, as I watched so many really stupid people lining up behind our demented President, and clapping with smiles on their faces, I thought of how the Jews did NOT fight back as they stood to be shot.

Why? Wouldn’t it be better to turn around and fight? Even if you KNEW you would be killed? Better to fight than to give in like sheep? Why did they just go to die? Was life that hard and they wanted to die? Or was it something else?

I’ve never smelt a corpse rotting, and I hope I never do, but right now, bodies of men and woman are rotting on the grounds in the Middle East.

Where gardenias do not grow.

J.R. Tolkien, wrote the Hobbit series to ease his own pain from the Wars being fought.

A masterpiece of Good vs Evil. Always the story line.

If I were rich, I’d sent a gardenia bush to every mother who had lost a child.

For life is filled with great joy, and great sorrow.

It’s was Elon Musk’s DAY today: April 10. Elon is fighting back against the evil of many.

And that’s because he knows evil from childhood. His mother, suffered much herself…They took that pain and fought back.

And today, I wish I could just, for one time, smell my grandmothers’ gardenia bush, where hundreds of flowers bloomed every summer to delight me…with the great love of my grandmother standing beside me, sharing the smells, the moment. Priceless.

Good vs Evil? Its always the same.

A great man, who fought evil, Mahatma Gandhi said this:

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall… think of it, always.

Let’s hope…he’s right.

Will the evil we see controlling us all, on the global march to death…will truth win in the end.

Gardenia’s or corpses?

Nobody Knows…but if history repeats itself: both.

April 20, 2024 - Posted by Joyanna Adams | Uncategorized | Beauty, fragrance, gardenia, life, perfume