Pretty Things

I confess.  I like pretty things.  Luckily for me, there are pretty things everywhere I look, everywhere I go. And amoung the prettiest of things, are the outside things, trees, grasses, flowers. I just can't resist them.  I am particularly fortunate that Tim enjoys bringing me flowers, but I don't mind buying flowers for myself either.  Friends, knowing how much I love them, have given me flowers as well, which endears them to me even more.  Flowers cheer a room, brings an ordinary room to another level. It says to me that this room is a special place.

But outside, in nature, that is where growing things are in charge.  Have you ever seen an abandoned parking lot that has cracks in the pavement?  Often you will find something growing in those cracks. I can't find it now, but once upon a time I took a photograph I was particurly fond of that had a bright yellow flower growing in a crack of sidewalk. Perserverance! Think about it, we stand inside where it's warm and dry and safe and look out at the rain and snow and heat and cold.  The plants and trees are out there through it all. They have no place to hide. And still they continue and thrive.

Right now I have a potted amaryllis growing on the window sill of the family room.  Every day I turn it one quarter of the way around so that it will grow straight.  You see, it leans toward the sun.  If I didn't turn it, it would keep leaning until it fell over.  That doesn't happen when it grows outside.  Out there, where the plant really belongs,  it follows the sun all day, it turns itself as the sun moves across the sky.  I suppose it's unfair of me to confine a plant to the inside of the house, it's probably an unnatural environment. But I couldn't resist having that beauty inside.  The joy of watching it go from a naked bulb to a gorgeous flowering plant was too enticing to pass by. Undoubtedly selfish of me.

I used to enjoy gardening, whether flowers or vegetables, trees or berry bushes, I gloried in that environment, what Tim called Sam outside playing in the dirt.  When we moved to Colorado I seemed to have fallen out of that pleasure.  It was such a struggle to keep things alive, from digging the holes in the hardened clay, to amending that "soil" to combating the unrelenting heat of the summer and the equally viscious cold of the winter and never ever having enough water. I think I threw in the towel after just a few years and only planted what I knew would grow regardless of it's harsh environment.

Now we live in a growing place again. And I'm surprised that I haven't planted anything.  We are lucky that our new home was already very nicely landscaped.  Still there are changes that I will make, somewhere along the line.  Perhaps I've been so focused on the inside that I haven't given much thought to the outside.  I'm not certain what is stopping me.  Lately maybe it's memories.

Gardening reminds me of my late Mother.  She could grow anything.  Plants and flowers that had no business thriving grew with such ferocity for her.  I was never that good. She had a special touch with growing things.  But I can't help but think of her and smile whenever I see pretty growing things.   Over the weekend, we went to the Ringling compound and amoung other things, walked through the rose garden.  I had forgotten but that last time I was there, we were visiting my parents here in Florida.  We took my Mother to that very rose garden.  She could have spent days there.   So this weekend, while Tim and I walked amoung the rows of fragrant, beautiful roses in that garden, I could almost feel my Mother walking beside me.

She also loved pretty things.