Bits And Pieces ...

Garden Bouquet

This is a bouquet of bits and pieces from my garden ... bold zinnias, bursting blue balloon flowers, buttery yarrow, purple buddlea, lovely lavender and leafy sprigs of things that have already flowered and gone by, like false indigo. Of course the garden itself is a bouquet, best seen in person and as a whole in order to appreciate the different values of green, yellow, red, etc.

It's been a bits and pieces kind of week for me. A holiday right smack dab in the middle of any week always leaves me in a strange mood. Is it Sunday or Saturday? Why is tomorrow Thursday? And why didn't the mailman bring me the books I recently ordered from Amazon?

Add to that the fact that I spent 9 hours on Tuesday at our local hospital in order to have a kidney stone removed which in itself only took 30 minutes. I arrived at 11 AM for surgery at 1 PM, but it didn't happen until 4 PM. I was back home by 8:30 PM. The anesthesia completely knocked me for a loop and I ended up sleeping all of July 4th away, though I did wake up in time to see the movie, Sicko, (not to be missed) and a very spectacular fireworks display nearby. Yesterday I felt completely frustrated because I hadn't gotten much "accomplished" this week. A few bits and pieces of garden work here and there plus the surgery and the needed recovery time somehow didn't add up to getting "stuff " done.

If you ask me what "stuff" is I couldn't really tell you ... yes, there is the bread I wanted to bake and didn't, the laundry and all the other "things" that somehow became more important than taking the time to keep myself healthy by doing the bothersome surgery and then spending a sleepy day healing.

So, I'm grabbing a lesson from that lovely bouquet of flowers I just gathered from the garden. Each stem is a piece of something larger, and in the arrangement of flowers they become a piece of something larger still, increasingly more lovely. And so go my days as well, becoming weeks, months and years. What is most important is that the whole arrangement of flowers or days is a gathering of what was and is, right now ... an absolutely marvelous gift any way you look at it.