ELEPHANT-EAR COMMUNICATION

Last Saturday around noon I stepped from the computer at Genesis in Ek Balam, having just uploaded the week's Newsletter, and heard this: "Isn't it pretty?"

At Genesis, one side of the dining room opens onto a large garden jammed with as many ornamental tropical plants as possible. Lee, Genesis's owner, was sitting at a table next to a ten-ft-tall (3m) Elephant Ear plant. Th plant's huge, perfect, arrow-shaped leaves glowed in the midday sun, their pale vein-reticulations like embedded lace. Even so late in the day, on the leaves' waxy surfaces, silvery, thumbnail-size beads of water from the previous night's showers sparkled and shimmered.

"It makes you feel good just looking at it, doesn't it?" I said. Then Lee reminded me of studies finding that people occasionally exposed to natural environments are healthier than those without such contacts.

The Elephant Ears, just by being itself in a profoundly robust and beautiful manner, seemed to radiate composure, dignity and rootedness.

Lee and I had been discussing our President's most recent pronouncements, and the Elephant Ears had something to say about that matter, too.

"You know,"I said, "when I was a kid on the farm in Kentucky, the old farmers and their wives who were my neighbors may have agreed with most of Trump's policies, but I'm pretty sure that if a billionaire like him had come along back then with Trump's body language, facial expressions, hair-do, history, and manner of talking and dealing with other people, he'd have been laughed out of the county."

Then I wondered about the differences between rural and small town people of back then, and now. In view of the Elephant Ear's impressive presence, I decided this:

The intimacy of the old farmers and their wives with the seasonal cycles, the ways of plant and animals, rich and productive soil, their first-hand experiences with occasional bountiful harvests but more frequent floods, hailstorms, diseases, late frosts, their memories of cold, starry nights with new calves being born, of apple-picking and pig-killing times, and their certain knowledge of exactly where their food and wintertime heat came from, and all the work needed to get the food and heat from there to here... elevated those old farmers and their wives, so that they were wiser, maybe even nobler -- at least better judges of character -- than those who took their place, and have given us Donald Trump.