I’ve written many times about the bloodroot that grows in my yard. My late-March Facebook memories are almost daily reminders of my love for the tenacious wildflower. Why do I love bloodroot?
So many reasons.
How could I not love something so delicate and fragile, enduring and strong? Wind or rain can strip the stem bare. Each plant blooms once each year, sometimes only for a day. When the petals fall, the pretty part is over, but the plant returns the next March.
And really, that’s what I love most. Bloodroot is grace in a flowerbed. True grace—I do nothing to deserve those beauties. I have barely any interest in gardening (sorry, Mom) and am terrible with plants, but regardless of my botanical blunders, bloodroot survives. Thrives, even.
Grace.
Unearned favor, unwarranted goodness.
God’s grace.
Bloodroot is my reminder of grace—an embodiment of grace. It’s a joy I can’t create and a treasure I can’t buy, a kindness I’ll never repay and a love I can’t match. A peace no pill provides and breath my lungs can’t draw.
On the days I find myself returned to “one day at a time” mode, it’s the acknowledgment that those days happen, that I’m not alone, and that I’ll survive.
Today turned into one of those days; sometime this afternoon, sadness clobbered me. I can’t explain the emotional spiraling down; either you know or you don’t. It happens and it sucks. Today, a few sentences in a book had me questioning and rethinking conversations and signs so many things I can’t change. Spiral, spiral, spiral.
When I got home, I checked the flowerbed and found a few tiny white flowers, the steel magnolias of my yard. Sturdy and fragile, long-lasting and fleeting. My little beauties opened today, their tissue-paper petals gently smiling up at me on a day I thought was too cool and too soon for the bloom.
They survived another year with the anti-gardener.
I survived another day of the unimaginable.
Grace.
Woods Writes 