Count me among the millions who can’t resist the sight of a beautiful flower. Food comes from flowers, reason enough to love them. It is no superficial relationship that we have with these beauties. But beauty helps doesn’t it? Food for the eyes is nourishment for the Soul.

The speed of spring is overwhelming. One day the trees still look grey and drab. The next day there are hints of red and yellow and green. Then all of a sudden the trees are blocking my view of the neighbors, dogwoods are blooming, and I didn’t, or couldn’t, observe it all happening. Buds and shoots appear all around. Patches of grass go from brown to green. Asparagus and stevia and mint reappear like magic from the ground. It’s almost impossible to keep track of, but the flowers really steel the show, tantalizing us with the hope, (never really a promise,) of cherries and strawberries, blueberries, nectarines and artichokes.

As great and necessary as food is, it’s enough for flowers to just look beautiful. Daffodils and hyacinths and tulips are the harbingers of spring.  They signal the end of drab, cold days and smoke from the chimney. They will be a memory by the time the roses start blooming. Sometimes they get burned by the cold, or crushed by hail, and have to hibernate for another year to fulfill their destiny. Even the toughest flowers never last very long, their beauty fleeting, their foliage just a reminder that the flower ever existed.

Spring races by too, like an impatient child, reaching for the moment when all the seeds have sprouted and becoming has become. And me, like a perpetual child, I watch in awe and exclaim at each bud and bloom as though I have never seen it all happen before. Even though I have passed the springtime of my life, each year is like a mini-lifetime, and spring flowers are eternally pleasing.