honest morning

Today I woke up with some sadness creeping round my heart. I don't know why it was there, but I got up anyway. Got dressed for work. Fed the dogs and let them out to walk, and fed Marcos, the cat, outside. I walked past my wind chimes and let my fingers drift across them so I could hear them before going to work. On the way to work, I thought about God and my kids and the hot pink bloom on a plant my former mother in law gave me before she died recently. I'm horrid with plants, truthfully, and have little affinity or desire for them, but this one has survived even Me, and on Easter Sunday it graced my morning with a single vivid blossom. So as I pushed on the gas to pass the slow trucker, (sorry, Natty), and as I turned up the volume on the Lenny LeBlanc CD I got for a quarter at the Sunnyside Community Book Sale last week, I focused all my inward thoughts on that single pink bloom.

And my spirit lifted. Just like that.

yellow sunshine, blue sky

This morning as I sat in my car at 4:30 a.m., letting the engine hum before putting it in drive, the lights illuminated my carport and our miniscule front porch. My youngest daughter, Caroline, left her blue scooter out again, I noticed, its black rubber handles leaning casually against the bamboo chair in the carport where I sit to read in the evenings. My old wind chimes, both bamboo, hung still and silent in the no-breeze morning. I glanced at the two plastic bowls, one red, one white, neatly placed by the old dog bed we have out for Marcos, the orange cat Caroline rescued when his owners left him - along with his litter box and those plastic bowls - on the front porch next door as they rumbled away in their U-Haul truck back in September. My heart filled as I sat there, dwelling on my simple, full to the brim, rich life here with these ordinary symbols of the family tucked within.