One Flower in a Field
Adapted from "One Flower in a Field" by Joshua Searle-White, in Magic Wanda's Travel Emporium: Tales of Love, Hate and Things in Between (Boston: Skinner House
One Flower in a Field
Adapted from "One Flower in a Field" by Joshua Searle-White, in Magic Wanda's Travel Emporium: Tales of Love, Hate and Things in Between (Boston: Skinner House, 2007).
Once upon a time there was a field. It had dry grass, brambles and thistles, and high places and low places, and rocks scattered around, and a stream that passed alongside. And scattered around, here, there and everywhere, were flowers. Buttercups and tulips, coneflowers and lupines, all kinds of bright, beautiful flowers growing up out of the dry grass.
Now, you may ask, how could these flowers grow when the field was so dry? The answer is that next to each flower was a hole in the ground. And in each hole lived an animal whose job it was to tend that flower.
Most were rabbits, but there were hedgehogs and field mice and even a badger or two. Every morning, each animal would come out of its hole, hop or scurry down to the stream, and use a leaf to scoop up some water. Then they would each carry their leaf back and water their flower.
In a little gully in this field, next to a tall sunflower, lived a rabbit. Every day she would go down to the stream and get some water for her sunflower. She loved that flower. It was tall and bright, strong and healthy, and she took very good care of it.
One afternoon, the rabbit decided to hop up to the top of a little hill alongside her gully. When she got to the top, she saw something she had never seen before. Down a ways, she saw a flower. It might have been a daisy, but it was hard to tell. This flower looked in bad shape.
Now, why had she never seen that flower before? It's not that big a mystery. She had just never climbed that particular little hill to look in that direction. Of course, she knew the field was full of flowers. She may have heard some were not doing quite as well as her sunflower. But she'd never actually seen one that looked as bad as this.
She hopped down the hill to take a closer look, and then, she began to understand. This flower needed water. Its stem was bent. Its petals were wilting in the heat. The ground around it was parched and dry. The rabbit felt bad that a flower could be so neglected. And then she did....nothing.
Even though the flower looked terrible, it was just one flower in a field, after all. The field had plenty of other flowers that were doing fine. The rabbit had enough work to do, watering her own flower. So she went home and got on with her business, getting up every morning, going to the stream, watering her sunflower and hopping around all afternoon.
But the other flower didn't go away. At least once a day, the rabbit couldn't help but hop up to the top of the hill and take a quick look. Every day, the other flower looked a little worse.
It started to get to her. The rabbit thought about that flower at night while she was trying to sleep. She thought about it in the morning when she hopped to the stream for water. She couldn't even enjoy her own flower so much, knowing the other flower was wilting more and more every day.
Now, you may wonder: Why didn't that rabbit didn't just go over and water the flower? After all, it was not far away, just on the other side of the hill. The stream had plenty of water. And the rabbit had plenty of time.
Well, that's a good question. The rabbit thought about it all the time. She'd think about making an extra trip to the stream, to get some water for that flower. But then she'd think, "Well, you don't just march into someone's front yard and water their flower without asking, do you? What if that flower is someone else's to water? They might yell at me or something." Or she'd think, "What if the flower likes being dried-up and droopy? That's possible, isn't it?" Or she'd think, "Aren't there animals who are supposed to go around and help out flowers whose animals don't water them? I should leave it to them... Right?"
With all these questions swirling in her head, the rabbit went about her business, taking care of her sunflower every day and trying not to think about the other flower. But it kept bothering her, especially at night. It was kind of irritating, actually. Sometimes she wished the flower would just get better by itself, or die. But every time she sneaked a peek, there it was, looking more dry, more wilted and more droopy.
Finally, the rabbit could stand it no longer. One morning, hopping from the stream with a leaf full of water for her sunflower, she suddenly thought, "It's just not right. Flowers are not supposed to wilt like that. Flowers should be healthy and colorful and bright and beautiful." And she found herself hopping over the hill toward the other flower, taking the water there instead.
At the top of the hill, the rabbit got a bit nervous. Her nose twitched as she sniffed t