Which is more beautiful? Is it this flower? That flower? This plant? That plant? Maybe that one over there. It’s a good thing there’s no test. They can be all the most beautiful. You don’t have to settle for one.
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Which Is More Beautiful?
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First Blush
The green plums are starting to blush. Every day I check to see if the deer have found them yet. Yesterday, instead of being greeted with plump green plums, I saw tinges of rose and purple. The first blush of ripening plums.
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Hazel Becomes a Mother
You’ve got a reason to pop that champagne bottle open, the one you’ve been saving all these years, waiting for that special occasion. Hazel’s a mother. Her chicks started hatching yesterday. She’s two and a half years old and this is her first clutch. She’s a sweetheart. A chicken Dr. Seuss would draw. One of her chicks has a bare neck too. Cheers!
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Melon Dew – Beauty Strikes
When you garden, be prepared for beauty to strike at any moment. Being struck by bolts of beauty is a hazard of vegetable gardening. Maybe humans aren’t designed to handle so much beauty. It might be why they flee the countryside and flock to the cities, to get away from being overwhelmed by nature’s beauty. Nature is unrelenting when it comes to stimulating the senses with beauty. It might be safer for the psyche to live in a high-rise, far from nature, with only other high-rises to look at out your window.
This morning I went into one of the hoop houses to tend melon plants, and was awed by the melon leaves. During the night, the melons had shed excess water through the fringes of their leaves. The leaves were fringed with wet diamonds. You don’t see such beauty at Tifanys or Cartier. You can’t buy this beauty. It’s in the garden waiting for you, for free. You just have to have the fortitude to handle such unexpected beauty at any time when you grow vegetables. Perhaps I should wear dark shades when I garden so I don’t succumb to overstimulation. How much rapture can an individual tolerate? There must be a limit. If these posts suddenly cease, you’ll know I have succumbed and am lying lifeless between vegetable beds, a victim of nature’s beauty.
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Nothing Is Just A
It’s just a flowering plum tree, only it’s not just that. For ten years we’ve watched a flowering plum tree with dark burgundy leaves grow in our backyard. Each spring it delights with pink clouds of plum blossoms. Today, we noticed that for the first time, the tree is loaded with cherry-sized, sweet plums. We picked seven pounds of them this afternoon, and we barely made a dent on the fruit hanging in the tree.
Nothing is just a whatever. It’s always something much more.
