Beautiful day on the porch. I’m sitting in the swing and pondering. Penelope is taking a siesta in her playpen. God always sends us a pretty day after a stormy day. I love these bright blue skies and cloroxed clouds. My yard is such a pretty shade of green. Took three days to go from beige to green. Someone down the street is mowing and it smells like spring. The birds are frisking around, glad they’re not fighting the wind. Have not seen the turkey vultures in two days. Hope they’ve moved on and aren’t nesting here. I heard the owls last night. They had quite a conversation and a loud argument. Maybe they were trying to get the vultures to move on. Research says vultures are scared of owls! Might need to study up on vultures. I don’t know many facts about them.

I always pick a bouquet of wild violets when they start blooming in the spring. Sometimes Chief would bring me a handful. We had zillions of them in our yard in Alexander City, purple and white. I’d put them in a crystal salt shaker. The blooms are beautiful, like miniature orchids. Ran up on a few blooms this morning walking Penelope. Brought two blooms home and floated them in a demitasse cup saucer. The blooms are about the size of a dime. I just never appreciated all the beautiful wild flowers that bloomed around our yard. I miss them so much! I could always find a little yard bouquet. Gonna work on getting some wildflowers established here.

Never realized how beautiful my backyard bamboo forest is with the morning sunlight streaming through the different colored trunks and branches. The light was just perfect when I pulled the curtains open early morning. The different colors of green on the culms (trunks) and branches, the open spaces where the sun was brightest, the different shadows. I’ve always thought the bamboo a nuisance but today I saw them in a different light. Bamboo is commonly called the poor man’s timber. Bamboo has lots of uses, construction, food, furniture, fabric, wallpaper, to name a few. But all our bamboo has ever done is attract mosquitoes and build a few tiki huts for the senior proms. Like I’ve said before, I don’t know what possessed my daddy to plant them. They spread down the street behind several houses. If the windows in your house are 103 years old like mine they make great poles to hold the windows open. When I remodeled the sunroom we threw away the old bamboo poles. Chief always cut new poles each year, all the same length, so the windows would be symmetrical. I’m saving up for new windows now but with almost 50 windows in this house, I’ll be using bamboo poles for a good while.

When you look at an ordinary object in an unordinary way you see it differently. I noticed how beautiful the female song birds were this year when I took time to really look at them. The males automatically draw your eyes because their featherings are so dramatic compared to the females. The myriad of colors on female bird feathers are so pretty, the different tones of light and dark. The colors melding into each other. God actually spent more time painting the females’ feathers. He had to wash his brush many times. Just took a big swipe of color on his brush to paint they males.

We don’t need to look at life with a magnifying glass to see all the beauty that’s right before our eyes. We always see the bigger picture but sometimes we need to focus closer. We don’t have time to see the bumble bee’s flight, the beauty of the tiny wild violets, the myriad of colors in the sunset and sunrise. We just need to look, really look, and we can find the beauty in everyday life that surrounds us. It’s right before our eyes.