Today was such a gift. Beautiful dark blue sky with no clouds to mar the perfection of a clear sunny day. Mother Nature must be trying to fly a large kite. The wind is really blowing. My friend could hear the wind chimes while we were talking on the phone. I was in the house while we had our conversation. Was too cold to eat breakfast on the porch but after running around town for a while it was perfect when I came home to sit and ponder. I love sitting in the swing and just letting the earth rotate around me. Sometimes I do some deep thinking and sometimes I just reminisce with all the memories. Sometimes I just lean back and let the sun warm my face.

Chief liked to sit on the porch in the dark and I was afraid of critters when the lights weren’t on. I wish now I had sat out there more with him. Before we became a couple I spent many happy Friday nights sitting on the porch with his family. His sister always invited me over for Friday night supper. Chief would always sit on the porch floor and lean back against one of the porch bannisters. His mother would have the living room lamps on and it gave just enough light on the porch to make it pleasant. Many, many happy evenings on that porch.

Planted my vegetables in my pot garden this afternoon. Not that kind of pot, but that might help my arthritis! Two of the pots had fire ants in them. Course I didn’t know till I started digging in the dirt. They ate my hands up and one crawled up my leg chowing down as he crawled. To be so little, they have a powerful sting. Research says they prey on flea larva, cockroach eggs, ticks and other pests. The pot where I grow my herbs had a huge mound in it. The cold nights weeks back killed the rosemary but the mint is thriving. Maybe the ants like mint. I pulled up a weed in the mint pot and the ants swarmed out.

I went to the farm store and bought gloves and ant killer. That was my second trip of the day to Awbrey’s feed and seed store. I love Awbrey’s, beautiful green things and seeds. The store even has pretty fruit fly traps! I just love to wander around in the store. Chief loved to buy garden seeds and vegetable plants there. Wish we had kept our McMurray family hardware store going. Daddy had a huge beautiful cabinet that held bulk seed. Had pictures of seed packets on the little glass doors on each cubby hole. That cabinet would have been a really neat Lego storage unit in a playroom.

While I was trying to move my big pots around I started thinking of how our lives are like gardens. We all come from different gardens and we all plant different seeds. Our gardens rely on us to sustain them. Gardens need healthy soil and water and fertilizer and lots of sunshine. Our lives have to be nurtured, too. We all get to choose the seeds we plant in our gardens. We can plant positive or negative seeds in our lives. We can tend to our own garden or waste time trying to tend to everyone else’s garden.

If we allows the “weeds” to grow in our lives, they crowd out our dreams and hide them. If our lives are rooted in faith, we can weather the droughts of doubt and the stormy times and find sunshine in the days to come. We need to choose our seeds thoughtfully and wisely. We can have perfect moments like the beautiful blooms on the flowers. The blooms drop their petals, but we preserve our life’s blooms in our memories.

“Your thoughts are the seeds. The harvest can be either flowers or weeds.” — William Wordsworth