Friday - 05/28/2021— You may have noticed (or maybe you didn’t) that I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days. Wanna know why?
I’m glad you asked.
I was getting ready to post that last journal entry of mine when I realized that I wasn’t having as much fun doing the daily posts as I used to have. I am nothing if not flexible, so I changed my daily process. From now on, I’ll be posting each Friday (most likely). And each of those Friday posts will be a memory of mine, instead of just the day-to-day “this is what I’m thinking about” stuff. After all, I AM teaching people how to write their memoirs.
So, here goes. This picture is one I took back in 2013, and I’ve probably shown it to you before this. Maybe several times before this. But, like so many good things, it bears repeating.
My grandma loved her irises. She spent a lot of her “spare” time—not that she had much of that since she was a farm-wife—down on her hands and knees caring for her flowers. They were there for no other reason than for the beauty of them. They couldn’t be eaten like the veggies she planted. They couldn’t be worked into thread and thence into clothing the way flax might have been. They didn’t grow heavy thorns and therefore couldn’t be used to surround fields to keep out predators, the way thorn hedges are used in many countries. They couldn’t provide shelter from storms or matting for the floor.
They were for sheer gorgeousness. And they give me as much pleasure as they must have given Grandma when she rooted the ancestors of these very plants more than a century ago.
’Bye for now. I’ll see you next Friday.
The iris is beautiful. The website would not let me comment last week.