When I was younger, my parents had a home in the hills of Kensington, just above Berkeley. It had a wide view of the San Francisco Bay, the kind of place where the fog rolls in like a second language, and summer mornings feel sacred.
My mom and I both loved morning glories.
Not the delicate annuals, but the tenacious kind: Perennial Ipomoea
The ones that root deep and return year after year.
The kind that donât ask permission to spread.
She planted one in the lower garden.
Just one.
And then, quietly, season after season, it climbed the fences.
It wandered into neighborsâ yards.
It spilled over retaining walls and slithered up and down the hillside.
Before long, that single vine had taken over dozens of gardens, bursting into bloom in the early light.
You could see it best in the morning light, her vine, her beauty⌠growing everywhere.
She had a word for it: subversion.
I remember feeling:
That joyfully defiant kind of growth.
The kind that doesnât stay in its lane.
The kind that adds beauty by refusing to be contained.
I think about that plant a lot lately.
About how something simple, rooted in love, can spread without asking.
How beauty, once released into the world, doesnât need permission to keep going.
Maybe itâs not just plants that do that.
Maybe people do, too.
#rebaVSfred
