We've been noticing this past week that the jonquils are blooming out all over. I take it that the warm winter weather is coaxing the flowers and trees to bloom and bud early, maybe just in time to get bitten by a cold snap. But I think as we come toward the last of February many of us are beginning to wish for Spring, and the greens and yellows are welcome sights.
We first noticed that June Easley's hillside has come out in full bloom. It may be that some of our newer Pea Ridge residents are not aware that the hill on Ark. Hwy. 94 south of town is Easley Hill. It has been Easley Hill since the 1940s and earlier. Easley Hill of course drops us down into the Little Sugar Creek valley on the way to Rogers. State Hwy. 94 crosses the bridge and takes us up Friday's Hill (the Howard Nye Hill), and soon reaches the intersection of Tuck's Chapel Road and the old Pea Ridge Lane. Old Pea Ridge Lane used to be the highway which followed the narrow valley, then came up the hill past today's Waggoner farm. Then as you continue south across the flat and begin the descent to the Brush Creek swoop, you will see another stretch of bright yellow -- more Easter flowers budding out on the hillside and even right up to the roadside. We old-timers refer to that stretch of flowers as "Effie's flowers" remembering Effie Clanton Johnson, who in the years ago lived with her husband Harry in the house up the hill west from the flowers.
I have never been very good at identifying particular kinds of flowers, although I think I can identify a rose, a zinnia, a carnation, a tulip, a jonquil, a glad, honeysuckle and a few others. My family always just called these beautiful yellow or white flowers which bloom in early spring "Easter flowers." Sometimes they bloom out well before Easter, but they are almost always in full bloom by Easter Sunday. It seems to me very fitting that they are called Easter flowers, since they bloom at Eastertime, and since they represent a restoration or return of life and color after a season of lifeless gray and cold.
Another thing I notice about the "Easter flowers" is that they keep on keeping on. They don't quickly disappear, even after the people who planted them have moved away or gone on. One can often identify places where houses and farmsteads once stood by looking for the rows of flowers coming up and blooming every spring. When I try to write, I am usually trying to compare our current times to earlier times "back then," the "Now" with the "Then." The returning flowers year by year tie the times together, reminding us of the generations that have gone before us, and of their contributions to the formation of our communities and of the character of our civilization. To me the flowers are reminders both of the tender vulnerabilities of our way of life and of the durability and continuing renewal of life.
I think "Effie's flowers" were probably planted during the Great Depression of the 1930s. During that time most people were wrestling with serious economic deprivations. For the most part, people didn't have much money to spend. Many well-off people had lost just about everything. Banks went bankrupt and closed. Fortunes were lost. Mortgages went unpaid, foreclosures abounded, and many were unemployed and homeless. Those who were able to hold onto land and houses were fortunate, but even most of them had to struggle to grow food and produce other essentials and to keep house and home together. It was a gray time which lasted a long time.
However, the Easter flowers to me stand for something great about people who have endured and survived tough economic times. They often didn't allow the bleak economic conditions around them to take all the beauty and vitality out of their lives. They planted flowers. They kept trying. They kept coming back to the task year after year. They planted gardens and field crops, helped their neighbors, supported their schools, provided for the aged, established rural electricity, and kept on hoping for and expecting better times ahead. There's something about seeing a vision of beauty, wanting to create scenes of beauty, which go along with thinking great creative thoughts, attempting great things, anticipating great things, and being a great people.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. The opinions expressed are those of the author. He can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 03/01/2017