Kinds of Honey

Two weeks of rain and all I can think about is how glad I am for spring.

And this morning the sun shines.

Today is my birthday and I am not near my best friends and beloved family. Part of me wants to sulk. The other part looks around for what comfort and joy can be found here.

How I might be grateful for life on this day.

Among those things: les belles fleurs. It is perhaps among the girliest of things to love them, but so be it.

Every day I walk past small lilac bushes, just beyond the door to my apartment. They are so tiny and in such a shady spot that they’ve started opening their purpleness and fragrance much later than the others around the complex.

That scent is always a gift. It reminds me of Minnesota summers, lying in the grass in the shade of the huge lilac bush to read, and keenly aware of the bees buzzing busily overhead – back and forth between the luscious flowers and wherever their hive might be.

On impulse and self-indulgence (it is my birthday) I bought two mini rose plants. A neighbor moving to a home in the mountains left me three terra cotta pots and so I spent a few moments filling them with the darling new buds, tucking the roots into their new abodes.

I am a wildflower Iowa girl. On my farm I will have meadows full of wildflowers, doing all the good they can for the soil, and the bees, and me.

And yet I so love roses.

My new rose plants give me hope and company and a little of my old romantic self on this birthday. Flowers didn’t need to be beautiful and interesting and yet they are; they exist; they are a part of the world’s richness.

I am happy to be here and to share this place with them.