Thsi Baby Aint Gone Yet

This is one of two geraniums that were Mother's Day presents and have ever since been hanging at the sides of my postage stamp patio. That is to say, they are almost exactly six months old -- at this location, never mind their starts back in some greenhouse. The leaves, as you can see, are turning red in homage to autumn but the flowers are still pretty perky and there are some buds that might yet open.

I feel both kindness toward and kinship with these geraniums, surely septagenarians in their species. They have not had a soft cushy life, certainly not in the past couple of months as the temperatures drop into the forties and even upper thirties at night. But we have had many very beautiful days in the last week and my geraniums respond with vigor and zest. I take them, for now at least, as totems to my new abode and new life in this very different place than I have lived previously. They were gifts from my daughter and I couldn't have had a better Mother's day gift. Someday snow will fall on them and they will die a natural death -- I am not a gardener who wishes to bring them in and force them to endure a protracted dotage. This is not a covert comment about my own feelings about life's final stages for myself. I'll deal with that when it comes as, of course, is bound to happen. For now I'm feeling at least as vigorous as these flowers and hoping to sprout a few new blooms of my own -- after all, as I've noted in these posts, I'm well into a novel once given up but now taking on new life. It is not an accident, this time around, that two of the characters are octogenarians.