Spring Delights

Living in South Texas means that a lover of lush, luxuriant old hardwood trees like myself is going to find themselves longing to be back in the forest — and there’s no forest here.  But what one doesn’t get in the lovely northwoods is the aroma of Star Jasmine as they walk down the street!

Our first Spring here is bringing us new sentient delights.  We knew so little about the area that we never thought about the sights and sounds that are amusing us now.  We saw various plants and animals in the area and because we weren’t familiar with them the implications of their presence went unnoticed.

For example…. As a northerner I always knew Star Jasmine as a vine. You got it at garden centers and it looked really pretty, but it wasn’t the easiest plant to grow.  Up north it’s a houseplant, or maybe a summertime patio plant. But here…..  A few hundred feet from our door we have a Star Jasmine growing as a shrub and lately the aroma fills the air as we pass by. I feel like I’m in the tropics! Even more than that… I feel like one of those dogs you see who is enjoying their walk — with nose twitching away with every new aroma!   I love the aroma of jasmine.  I tried (unsuccessfully) to grow it in Milwaukee — after a few months it just shriveled up and died — here it’s growing pretty much untended, un-watered and ignored. I could get used to this.

I went online to find which cultivar we might need if we decide to add jasmin to our garden — a plant that isn’t an aggressive grower needing a lot of pruning and doesn’t need watering sounds just up my alley.  Who wouldn’t love that aroma just outside your office window? 🙂

So much of our life right now is difficult to write about.  On the surface not much appears to be going on and yet internally I feel like someone’s in there with a great big wooden stirring spoon just moving things about and adjusting the recipe to something… just what we don’t know… but we’re eager to see what develops.

Waiting for the wedding… our granddaughter’s wedding… means that we’re in a state of anticipation. Sheesh! I can’t remember what the last thing might have been that we waited this long to experience. Even the decision to retire came and went faster than the wait from engagement to wedding (not that we are complaining — we aren’t)  — it’s just that we rarely, rarely, rarely arrange our own lives with such time delays.  I’m that “see it-think it—do it” sort of guy who avoids delay.  By now you should have figured that out, but perhaps not.

The bottom line, though, is that a great life isn’t about externals; isn’t about the things that happen TO you — it’s about who you are.  We carry our happiness with us — it’s internal — and all we have to do is adjust our way of thinking to let it out.  Even when times are rough there can be found much to be happy about if we choose and the secret is choosing to do just that.