Peony

3: a little bit of life
This entry is not so much about an event. It's more just a tiny snippet of one day this week where a little thing brought me a little bit of joy.

I was walking home from school with the kids who decided to go an alternative route to our normal one(s). There is a choice of three routes home & each day there tends to be a discussion regarding the preferred route for that day.

Grace has just discovered a 'secret pathway' that she wanted to show us, and is pretty convinced it is a short cut. I am almost definitely convinced that it is a long-cut. But that is fine. It's nice to have a change of scenery every now and then.

Anyway anyway anyway, as we were approaching the secret pathway, I was admiring a peony bush (a flower I have a particular affection for) and noticed that one of the unfurled flower heads from the bush was sitting on the wall. My guess is that another child walking that route home from school was unable to resist the great temptation to pluck the flower head from its stem, only to be reprimanded by their mum, and told to put it back. Being unable to perform a miracle and reattach the head to the stem, they left it on the wall for me to find.

So, also being unable to resist the temptation, and hating to see a flower go to waste, I pocketed the flower head. Thanks to me, this little peony saw far more of the world than it would have otherwise. Amazingly, the peony head made it all the way back to my house relatively unscathed, surviving a bumpy, speedy cycle ride home, all the while sat willingly in my back pack, knowing that the best was yet to come: Water.

As soon as I got in, I popped the peony into a coctail glass of water & let the water work its magic: