for Christmas i got a little plastic cup with a peat pellet in it and a pack of seeds.

my little e and i carefully read the directions

(well, i read them and she repeated them after me)

before we planted them.

she was so ready to see them growing 5 minutes later

and as she somberly carried the cup from the window sill to me, she sadly said,

“they didn’t work“.

ah, patience is a learned skill and i am perhaps not the best model of it.

a week and a half later when the little seedlings poked their tiny newborn heads out of the soil

taking their first peek at the world,

my youngest tenderly carried them around quietly singing to them.

this greatly concerned my son.

‘is that good for them?‘

‘do they like it?‘

‘will she hurt them?‘

i think my assurances only partially comforted him.

we find it so hard, don’t we?, to accept things outside of our own understanding.

i even find it hard to believe God, the creator of everything, when His way is not my own.

(this, of course, is often.)

next, my girl decided she must share the new sprouts with everyone, absolutely everyone.

so each person who entered the house

each family memeber who entered the room

and each soul who braved a telephone call into our day

was told at the top of her little lungs ‘smell them!‘

as simultaneously the  fuzzy green growth was thrust at their faces

(or at their receiving ears as the case may be).

i love her enthusiam.

i hope

no, i pray

that the things that are important to me are obvious

blatantly unaviodable, to everyone who touches my life in anyway.

this is all on my mind as i tie up the loose ends (literally) of my test crochet for karla.

it is the leaves that got me thinking.

we work so hard to flatten and straighten our work

when it is nearly finished

by wetting and blocking and drying it just so.

yet, these little green bits of crocheted wool of the andes

look the most like ‘real’

the most like the way leaves were actually created

if left to curl

and bend

as they will …

… sometimes i spend a lot of time,

ever so distracted.

fighting against all the wrong things.

here’s to today, a monday, a new day

and to a clean (forgiven) slate.

‘leaves’ taken from 22:2 of revelations.