It’s been a rough winter over here.  Not weather-wise, but mood- and circumstance-wise.  Every now and then there are things that bring me hope and help me keep going.

This picture is one of them.

This is a shoot on an orchid that I adopted.

It was lonely and very sad looking at the store.

It looked like it was going to die.

Since it looked incredibly sad, its price had been marked down.  After all, if you’re going to buy an orchid, you want one that’s blooming with glorious abandon.

Who really wanted a sad-looking, probably-going-to-die orchid?

I did.  I was willing to take a chance on it, give it some love, and see if it grew.

That was a couple of years ago.

Since its adoption, it’s in new soil in a new pot with more room to grow.  It’s been fertilized and watered on a semi-regular basis.

And now it feels safe to grow.

I like to think.

Whether it feels or not is a speculation for another time.

Either way, conditions are just now where they need to be for it to put out a shoot with this little buds.

My orchid is going to bloom!

I will be sure to take all the pictures I can when it does.

I really needed the hope and joy that it has brought me this week.  It has not been an easy week.  Probably the antithesis of easy, really.

But I have a smidgen of hope thanks to my orchid.

That I adopted and tended for years and now it’s going to bloom.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere if you want to dig to find it.

Garden pun!  Ha!

Another thing that’s brought me hope this week has been seeing the little green shoots of leaves that are coming up all over the place.  Crocuses and daffodils and tulips are beginning to wake up after sleeping the winter away.

When I get to this point every winter, I begin to wonder if winter is going to last forever.

And every spring, these heralds of spring remind me that winter is on its way out.

It’s like how this passage from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe makes me feel:

Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree- gold and purple and white. Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of water. Close beside the path they were following, a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds’ music, and wherever Edmund’s eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks.
“Faster! Faster!” said the Witch.
There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travelers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate, transparent leaves. As the travelers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed crossed their path.

And this one:

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.
Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers- celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.

Can you feel the hope of spring in these words?  I can.  Gives me goosebumps every time I read this part of the book.

And every time spring comes, Aslan has defeated the White Witch once again.

Winter is gone.

Spring is come.

And, yeah, we’re probably going to get some more snow before spring fully shows her face.  But the nights won’t seem as long and the gray, dark days won’t seem as awful.  Because I know that spring is on the way.

It’s a yearly reminder that Death is now itself working backwards.

What a lovely thing spring.

What a lovely thing hope.