I adjust my focus to a new home.
Here, the flame on the stove burns higher. Coffee is ready sooner. Morning light glows orange in the kitchen.
And maybe it’s summer. Or I’m just a bit more lazy. But lately, I’m sleeping in past six.
A Hand In
Over the weekend, WordPress offers up a Daily Prompt urging photographers to post pictures of hands. I remember one I took a few years ago of my father’s hands wrapping wire near the tailgate of his work truck.
It’s the weekend and I’m lazy, so I only imagine posting the photo, never actually doing it. In the meantime, we visit Mary’s garden and she gifts me three big dahlia’s, wet with May rain.
This morning, I’m still thinking about my dad’s hands. The ones that are weathered from the sun, and always bearing some nick or scratch. They look tough but their skin is thin.
There’s something about the juxtaposition of hearty hands wrapping sharp wire and delicate blooms dripping with rain water. I want to put these images together. So different, yet, somehow connected.
I know Mary’s got working hands, callouses and dirt under the nails. But those hands cultivated these bursts of color blooming with petals, silky soft.
My father’s hands tighten barbed wire on splintered fence posts in 105 degree sun. But they also hold pen to paper, scrawling poetry of snow melt over granite and lush green pastures.
Here’s to what we have a hand in.
Olfactory Express
You’ve only got two hours if you want to make it to the Kilauea post office on a Saturday. Weekend hours got cut back a couple of years ago. I’m in line clutching my parcel to be mailed.
The contents are a project, which for now, shall remain nameless. It’s a culmination of something I’ve been thinking about for eighteen months and working on, diligently, for five.
This labor of love is two inches thick, heavy with content, and shipping priority, delivery confirmation requested.
As I wait in line for my turn at the counter, a woman in her seventies steps inside the door carrying a tray of gardenias.
“Good morning, would you like one?” she says to each of the handful of women that stand there. One by one, we beam smiles, choose a bloom and inhale happily.
I pick one that’s still budding but exuding a fragrance all the same. “Thank you.”
She leaves the final selection for our local postal worker who pauses at the package scale, takes a flower and says “Oh, my favorite!”
And with her delivery complete, the woman bearing blossoms leaves with an “aloha,” and then, it’s my turn to mail my hefty parcel.
I’ll take the gardenia gift as a good omen. Send my project to Chicago wafting on the perfume of Kauai backyard flower bushes.
It’s the way we ship here on the Garden Isle.
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