Over the summer, my mother and I went to Georgia to visit family. While in the south we took a road trip to Atlanta and stopped at the Botanical gardens. My mom and I took a combined 500 pictures of flowers.There was one room devoted to orchids. This room was literally covered, from the ground to the ceiling, in orchids. Did you know that every continent except Antarctica has orchids on it? How amazing is that!
There were a few other plants worthy of mention including one which blossoms smell like dead flesh. Although the docent we were talking to said that it actually smells more like dead flesh smothered in blue cheese. Yeah, true story.
However, of all the amazing and exotic flowers that were housed at the Botanical gardens there is one image that I can not seem to remove from my mind. I have a picture of it over my bed and I study it daily trying to figure out what it is about this image that is so – I don’t know, haunting, maybe.
One of the first things we saw when we walked in was a statue in the middle of a very small pond. The statue was of a small child staring up at the sky with a look of exhilaration and excitement for life on his face. I usually refer to the statue as a boy. On the one hand I think the statue is actually a girl, but on the other hand I think the sex is irrelevant.
At first I was so tickled by this child with this look of extreme pleasure and joy painted on his face that I failed to notice the rest of the image. Dangling from each hand is a frog. One is being held by its back leg facing downwards and the other being held by its front leg looking up at the child holding them captive. As if this picture wasn’t tormenting enough, upon closer examination I realized that the child was standing on a ball being held up by more frogs. The child is so giddy that if it were a real child I believe it would be doing the “I really have to pee dance” due to the sheer excitement of the situation he has found himself in.
I still can not find the right word or phrase that I feel this picture invokes. I can not get over it either. Every time I see it all I can do is stare at it and get lost in it trying to figure out what chord this child has struck within me.
