When one is living in the third month of renovating an 1956 home flowers become important. The beauty they bring to the space brings hope. Hope that this home will once again bloom with beauty and joy. Les and I are perhaps among the weakest gardeners in the area, but we are hopeful. As the backyard continues to take a beating with wood deliveries, saws, and immeasureable amounts of sawdust flying, there are a few scenes of tranquility. A comfy chair or four, ferns, a basket of flowers makes for an oasis in the storms of sawdust.
It seems that the chairs draw us to conversations in the evenings and early mornings. Conversations that perhaps would be misplaced in our previous city home. Outside time reminds us that things living grow, and die, and must be tended to thrive. Relationships too, follow that path, and this season has been a season of growing in ours. Trust in the processes, shared hope, and scary projects have a way of sorting us on the same team of this journey of life.
I’m a great believer in the power of pretty, the red begonias, the yellow daffodils have all played sweet songs of welcome each time I am weary as I return outside. I have found an old wicker loveseat in my hometown in Arkansas and brought it home, a favorite reading spot now. We need favorite spots in our lives, places we can drink in life and allow the beauty that is around us to sink in. Blue skies, lush greens, the colors themselves seem to be a nectar that is like a balm to my soul.
There is little quiet to the outdoors outside our home, the birds play, the squirrels are in endless torpedo zones with small tosses of their trophies. The birds play and swoop and sing to us if we’ll take time to listen. There are rhythms to life outdoors and they are music to me. A beautiful concert each morning and evening when I am not too busy with the work of the day to take in the majesty of that which is before me. The trim still is missing, the walls without drywall in the new room, a hundred projects that “won’t take but a couple of hours” when we get to them still loom before me, but this moment, this moment of being among the fresh dew of morning light, reminds me that in each moment we find life if we stop our seeking long enough to find it.
