Morning Light Upon My Colorful Blossoms!

                 As I ate breakfast I was struck in awe by the sunlit, pink blossoms on the flowering plum tree just beyond the fence and cardinal leaves of my Japanese Maple tree which is the center piece of my kitchen area courtyard.  The rains had forced me to focus on the inside of the condo, but the blossoming courtyards of the condo were beckoning to me like plants that knew just how to entice me to walk amongst them. 

                Grabbing my camera after my last bite, I quickly seized the moment.  The gorgeous morning light upon the plethora of petals and colorful leaves called to me, and I knew that it was fleeting.

                Like the beckoning of the garden, the thought of my collegiate son arriving later in the afternoon crossed my mind and spurred me to finish unpacking the few boxes that littered the upstairs hallway and bedrooms and vacuuming.  It took a few hours, but the closets were well organized as long term storage in the two guest bedrooms and certain areas of the office/sewing/storage room and master bedroom were piled with boxes for future exploration.

                Next the bare refrigerator had to be filled.  I was quickly becoming the stereotypical, single career woman with no food in her frig!  Bel Air, the local supermarket, was full of people gathering food for Easter celebrations.  Moving the cart down aisles took a great deal of patience with the clustering of people everywhere.  Not being familiar with the store layout did not help my grocery shopping efficiency either.

                The Easter lilies were the first item in my cart.  I’d be eating Easter lunch at my sister’s house and Easter lilies always reminded me of Blair’s and my journey to find the perfect Easter lily for Mom.  I had to get her one.  When we were young girls, we walked over a ½ mile to our local grocery store to get an Easter lily for Mom, but none of their lilies were in bloom.  So we left and walked to a Short Stop almost 2 miles from our home and found our treasure---the perfect Easter lily for Mom.  We gently carried it all the way home and our mom was so happy! 

                Once I gathered a basketful of food at the grocery store for my upcoming week and my visiting son, I headed home to bake.   I created a peach pie recipe in my head based on my apple pie recipe minus the spices.  Peaches need only sweetness with tartness to make a delicious peach pie.  I picked a lemon from the tree outside and used half its juice for the pie, ½ cup of flour to thicken the pie juice, and used a cup of Splenda to replace the cup of sugar.  After draining the three jars of sliced peaches and mixing the flour and Splenda, I layered the pie filling in a Pillsbury pie crust---Splenda mixture, bits of butter, lemon juice, and peach layers.  Then I closed the pie with the top crust and decorated it with an Easter bunny and crucifixes.

                I also cooked up some brownies for Drew and then took the trash out.  Just as I was heading through the garage, my neighbor who was my dad’s patient came over to buy three books!  Yay!  So I signed a few hard copies for him.  One thing of which I always knew the location was my sharpie pen for signing books. J  An active author always has several sharpies on hand!

                Drew finally arrived just before the brownies were finished.  For some reason my phone and internet went down between my neighbor’s book signing and my son’s arrival.  I couldn’t open the gate at the front of our community with my landline.  I was so disappointed in Comcast.  They just repaired my internet and phone connections on Thursday, but apparently they only repaired a symptom and not the root cause of the problem.  When I tried to contact them about sending a repairman out ASAP, they hung up on my three times!  If there was another reputable internet provider for my area, I would dump Comcast in a nanosecond.  I hate monopolies!

                Drew’s Hawaiian shirt caught my eye as he pulled up in the metallic-turquoise Nissan.  A neighbor in a cherry-red, Mercedes, sports car slowed in the distance, as if to study my son walking back to my condo with me.  I warned my neighbors that my son is 6’-3” and a little scary looking (not to me, but to conservative, rich people), but he is a sweetheart.

                I remember when I took Drew to a Romero’s concert at St. James and saw the reaction to his appearance from some of the older, Rancho Santa Fe ladies that didn’t normally frequent the church.   Even though they had had at least 3 plastic surgeries, they managed to show fear on their tightly-stretched, Botoxed faces. 

After the concert Drew asked me, “Mom, are middle-aged women afraid of me?”

                “Yes.  It’s your long hair and height.  Even your grandfather is a little intimidated by your height,” I honestly answered. 

Honestly, I found the faces of the surgically-altered women much scarier---even scarier than an adult Halloween mask.  Their life was a mask---a superficial representation of a happy life with too much money.  It seemed that they had no love of inner, lasting beauty that exudes from the eyes that see God’s gifts, laughing wrinkles, and a truly happy smile.   I only hope that those poor women had experienced real love.  How truly horrifying it would be to live a full life and never know love which is priceless.  Love is more priceless than seeing the morning sun alight the plethora of colors of the leaves and flower blossoms in my courtyards.

P.S.  To my blog readers:  If you want to support a struggling math/engineering teacher and author, please buy my first book, "The Romance of Kilimanjaro," soon to be followed by my second book at:  https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960         Thank You!