The Alchemy of Flowers and Tribulations
Welcome to Where Stories Grow, my blog about writing, teaching, and creativity, all coming to you from my small backyard garden.
Follow me on my journey as an author, high school English teacher, and backyard gardener. Every time something inspires me, you’ll be the first to know.
Thanks for clicking and reading, and I hope you’ll subscribe for free and stick around.
My spring break is the fourth week of April, a week later than usual this year. I am impatient since I need the rest. I’ve been having nightmares about teaching, including one dream where I was locked in my classroom after school, and my bed lowered from the wall on a hinge. Then the room turned into a haunted house where I had to live. Welp, if that ain’t the truth! I spend more waking hours in my windowless classroom than I do at home.
In other annoying news, I’ve reached that age where my eyesight is finally slowing me down. I got the tiniest splinter in the tip of my pointer finger while I was mulching a garden bed, and I couldn’t see it clearly enough—even with my reading glasses on and using a magnifying glass—to remove it.
For days, I left it there, convincing myself that it would fall out eventually. But no, a tiny sharp pain jabbed me every time I typed at work or at home. Finally, I had to rely on younger eyes to get rid of it.
Sometimes, it’s those tiny little things that are the last straw, or in this case, the last splinter.
Yesterday, my husband came home super frustrated. While he was driving, a seagull shit so much on the windshield, he could barely see. But when he turned on the wiper blades, there wasn’t enough fluid, so the blades just smudged it even worse. Eww! It was so bad, he had to pull over and walk to a store. His dramatic rendition of the event had me dying laughing.
This is the second annoying thing to happen to him in twenty-four hours. The other one was at an AT&T store, where our twenty-year cell phone account was flagged as fraudulent, and they refused to let him access our account. They claimed they couldn’t tell him the reason because that would reveal their security secrets. After hours of back and forth, and returning to the store three times, he finally realized they were calling my phone instead of his to verify our account, and I wasn’t answering since unknown numbers on my line are sent straight to voicemail.
I told my husband he must be ready to level up spiritually/emotionally because the universe likes to test us beforehand to see how we handle it, to see if we are ready to evolve.
We are here to learn, after all.
Have you ever noticed that in your life? I’ve seen that pattern in mine too many times to count.
A friend gifted me a hardcover garden book, Bringing Nature Home, with simple yet stunning displays of cut flowers brought indoors throughout each season by photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo and floral designer Nicolette Owen.
In the “Foreword” by editor Deborah Needleman, she writes that “a room is never at its best without flowers. Flowers show that a home is cared for and truly lived in. While furniture can remain the same for years, flowers speak to the present moment. And yet they are a talisman, a reminder of the world beyond our doors, of growth and change, and the passage of time.”
For the first time, I brought a forsythia branch inside to bloom early in my writing office, and it worked!
That golden hue inspired me to add small bouquets to every room in my home.
Every time I enter a room with cut flowers, my eyes instinctively focus on them for a tiny moment of joy. They ground me into the space like nothing else can. In the deep recesses of my brain and soul, something metaphysical awakens. It draws me to the soft petals and whispers, This is alchemy. Only magic could create this.
You know what else is a form of alchemy?
Empathy.
We need to hold on tight right now to what it means to be human. What it means to be humane.
What it means to be keepers of democracy. Keepers of this planet.
We can do this together.
The universe is testing us. Have we learned old lessons yet? Is it time to evolve?
One more thing to brighten your day: this is Atlas, the bearded dragon who lives at my local library. He’s getting so big!
Libraries are such important public spaces to support democratic values. With federal funding on the chopping block, please make a habit of visiting a library in your area on a weekly or monthly basis to show that you value its resources.
And join the Reading Revolution—let’s make reading visible again.
