Flowers For Socrates

by Nicole Plyler Fisk

I’m honored to be a contributing writer to this blog (thanks, Chuck, for the invite). For my first piece, I thought that something with flowers would be appropriate, so I’m adapting a diary I posted, originally, to Daily Kos. But, it’s hard to divert attention from the 2016 presidential election to Syria, both there and on my Facebook page, so anything that has to do with the latter quagmire needs all the help it can get, from as many platforms as will host it. Thanks, FFS, for being one of those. ~Nicole Plyler Fisk

Recently, UK Channel 4 News ran a story about “the last gardener in Aleppo.” The story follows an Aleppo man, whose name, Abu Wad, translates to “father of the flowers,” and his 13-year-old son, Ibrahim. For the past five years, Father-of-the-flowers and Ibrahim have maintained their garden center in rebel-held Aleppo, despite continuous bombing from Assad and his Russian allies. How have they managed? Father-of-the-flowers explains that they think of the bombs as Beethoven’s music, they remind themselves that the world belongs to ordinary people, and they constantly rebuild what’s been destroyed — by planting their flowers in public spaces, like roundabouts.

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