Hearts and Flowers, or Up-and-Down Spring

'A perfect heart-shaped stone Mom found out in my garden this spring. 

Spring has been lovely, 

and now we move into summer already.  The oldest I've ever been and the fastest-moving year I've ever had, and I'm sure the two go together.  I turned 42 last month, my older brother is only five years from 50, baby Bianca "graduated" kindergarten last week, "little" Dylan who started kindergarten just yesterday has a girlfriend and is in high school this fall with his sister, a new niece or nephew is due any day now, I have been struggling for awhile now with what seems to be psoriatic arthritis, and all this to say time has been flying and I have been feeling old.  Bianca's cat ↓ captures my wary watching of the seasons as they change.  :)

'A thousand changes at work lately too, which have made for a stressful spring.  As Lisa over at "Searching for a Balance" knows, balance isn't something you find once and cross off your to-do list, but instead something you have to re-find over and over every day.  I found the below heart on a table at my workplace one night this spring and had to laugh.  When a paper towel-piece heart randomly appears on a worktable, I have to take it as a reminder to "be still and know that [He is] God," right.   So I adjust to the thousand new changes and plod onward. 

And get a haircut that is way too short--where is my wild mass of curls!!!??!!  GONE!  I now have the smallest sprig of them, like an unruly paintbrush perched atop my head--

 --then I find a heart in my hummus and chips and chill out a little more.  Again. 

I made it home around Mother's Day and Father's Day so got to see both my family and my roses--Louise Odier is in bloom this very week!  ♥--and those things alone end this up-and-down June on a sweet note.  

Heaven on earth!  And the scent!!  ♥  I made a small bouquet of these and my white Iceberg roses for my sister-in-law Sunday as she works her way through her final days of pregnancy.   To her, the days are probably not moving along quickly enough.  

'Another perfect heart Tuesday afternoon, this one as I was waiting for the bus back to the apartment post-visit home.  And tomorrow, it will be summer.  Ay yi yi.  

♥

One of My Loves, Louise Odier

I made it home to my parents' house for a warp-speed visit last week, and one of the non-family highlights of my short stay was getting to see my beloved rose Louise Odier in-bloom in my old garden for the first time since 2007.  My spring visits home are usually over Easter and my May birthday, so I never get to see more than this beautiful rose's greenery anymore.  Last week, though, the timing was perfect:  Look at her!  ♥  This was my favorite rose in my garden:  Its color, its form, and its scent are all just Heaven-on-earth to me.  The next time I'm blessed with any kind of garden space, this will be one of the first plants I find for it.  Pure sweet beauty.  

Storybook Blooms and Little Girl Rouge

Although I didn’t start gardening until I was twenty-seven, my interest in it was sparked as a kid both by my grandparents’ wonderland of a yard and by a book my Mom bought me when I was maybe five or six, The Care Bears’ Garden.  My grandmother, for all the many flowers she had, never had Hollyhocks or Foxgloves while I was growing up, so when I saw them in the book’s illustrations, I thought of them as magical storybook kind of flowers--much like the giggling posies in the Chuckle Patch on "The Magic Garden," one of my favorite childhood TV shows and probably another inspiration. I didn’t know the cute drawings were based on real flowers. Hollyhocks and Foxgloves still delight me. This week, my own Foxgloves began to bloom.

My so-far-favorite rose, Louise Odier, also opened up this week. When I was little, the neighborhood girls and I would rub onto our faces the fallen petals of our neighbor Gracie’s roses, feeling quite womanly as we did so, of course. I’m transported back to those summer moments spent crouched in front of Gracie’s plastic picket fence every time I smell this flower.




All in all, I'm a happy five-year-old while in my garden this week, even if I've stopped rouging my cheeks with rose petals.