The Perfect Anniversary Gift

I am a firm believer in celebrating marriage. As a picture of Christ and the church, the Devil wages war on marriage. I believe it is the most challenging school of growth you could attend which makes the good times so very sweet.

Our 30th Anniversary cake, Stonehurst Place, Atlanta, June 2020

Last year was a big one for us: thirty years married!  It however happened to be during the COVID pandemic and all of our children were living with us temporarily. We went to Atlanta for two nights instead of celebrating in some grander way.  It was tough to find time or money to do such things while rearing a family so two nights felt like quite a treat.  However, this year our thirty-first anniversary was our first as empty nesters and I rather like the tradition we set last year of going away for our anniversary so I hereby declare that the standard has been raised!  Leaving an empty house that we have all to ourselves and paying for a small hotel room seems crazy but the change of pace and scenery is refreshing. It’s a big deal to still have each other after another year of marriage so a big deal should be made.

Our anniversary this year was on a Wednesday so we enjoyed a lovely lunch at the Gourmet Shop, a small cafe joined to a gourmet kitchen store.  We then paid a visit to our jeweler Bill at Unforgettable Jewelry. In March of last year, I painfully managed to get my wedding rings off with a thin piece of ribbon. I had been wearing them for years non-stop since my finger’s growth over the years had made them difficult to remove. Once I became unable to remove them, I knew something drastic would have to take place to get them off. I have missed being able to wear them this past year and this anniversary seemed like the appropriate time to have them sized. So we left them with Bill along with the sapphire ring my boyfriend-now-husband gave me in the twelfth grade and a couple of other pieces to be repaired. It turns out that my wedding rings had to be sized up a whole size! It’s hard to remember wearing a 4 3/4 but then again the rest of me has sized up more than one size since then. 

My 4 3/4 size ring and my 5 3/4 size finger. Ouch!

Friday morning we left for Charlotte and went straight to Smithfield’s Chicken ’N Bar-B-Q for lunch. After enjoying their show tunes and friendly service, we headed to Charlotte Premium Outlets nearby to divide and conquer.  I made purchases at Saks Fifth Avenue Off 5th, Loft, Ann Taylor, and Talbots.  Those are my go-tos and I don’t bother entering other stores at this outlet. Next we checked into the Ballantyne Hotel (click here for the post I wrote on this in 2016) and had a rest before heading to a late dinner at Viva Chicken for Peruvian rotisserie chicken and delicious sides.

Saturday morning, we slept surprisingly late and had brunch in the hotel’s Gallery Restaurant at lunchtime. Then we relaxed in the room and by the pool for the afternoon before our fancy anniversary dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. Everything was superb and it ended with a surprise anniversary dessert to share which was just right in every way.

We returned for breakfast Sunday morning and were served excellently again by the same staff from both previous meals.  The workforce shortage post-COVID was evident but the staff could not have been more upbeat and attentive.

We went back to our room to watch our own church’s service online and then we checked out to head to the Sistene Chapel Exhibition which is touring the country. A rented warehouse was full of close-ups of the thirty-four frescoes of Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel with a short write-up on each along with a chart of it’s location on the famed ceiling. The awe-inspiring experience of the real thing may have been lacking but it was neat to see the detail up close. It was a peaceful, slow-paced way to end our trip.

Or at least I thought the trip was over. I had spotted the Charlotte Flower Market on the way to the exhibition and looked it up, in doubt that it was something I could visit without a business license. However, after investigation and my husband’s insistence, we went and found it open to the public.  I actually held back tears as I entered the flower cooler with access to every flower they sold. A rather dashing chap carried the bucket as I filled it with one beautiful stem after another.  I could hardly think of what I wanted for being amazed at this happy development. I went home with a smile and a bucket full of arranging fun for the next day. What a perfect way to end a wonderful celebration of God’s goodness to us!

Well, that was the trip and every part of it was so nice, but I haven’t told you yet of the best moment.  It’s a moment that I will Be Keeping in my heart. The night of our fancy anniversary dinner, Jeff was ready before I was so he left me to finish getting ready while he went to the car for his jacket and would then wait in the lobby for me to come down for dinner. I enjoyed my time of primping for my special date and took the elevator down to find Mr. Handsome sitting on a couch in the lobby. What I wouldn’t give to have a video of his response! Remember that he saw me 30 minutes earlier and has worked from home for the past 16 months and has been married to me for 31 years and dated me 11 years before that. When I walked my 53-year-old self into the lobby of that hotel, Jeff stood up, his face turned red, he smiled like a school boy and GOT EMOTIONAL! He walked to me and hugged me and kissed me and whispered, “You’re so pretty.” He took my hand and walked me toward the hotel restaurant but with his head down saying nothing but a few sniffs. It was the kind of response I could have only hoped for at his first look at me in my wedding gown.

It’s a miracle that I am telling you this, and I know I will regret being so transparent just after publishing it. If you only knew how I feel about myself. If you only knew how difficult it is for our opposite personalities to get along. If you only knew how low I felt the night before, after trying clothes on this foreign body of mine and looking at my reality in the dressing room mirrors in bad lighting all day.  There’s a grieving process a woman goes through as she watches her youth die. I am great at beating myself up and I like to use one failure as a diving board to plunge into an inner tongue-lashing of ALL my failures. But Jeff sees me differently, and I can believe his loving response was sincere because I know him well and he is not a liar. I truly do not care what anybody else on earth thinks of how I look, but what Jeff thinks of me means everything. Nothing he could have bought me would have been a more perfect keepsake from the weekend than his sweet response was.

I don’t write this to promote myself or to gross out my children. The reason this is worth sharing is because it was such a perfect illustration of what the Lord has been trying to teach me. The more I learn about God and His holiness, the more ashamed I am of my sin and my very nature. I can quote the verses about how much He treasures me—the one He gave His life for, provides for, protects, sustains, communes with, takes pleasure in— and I have sung “Jesus Loves Me” my whole life, but I feel like I am a disappointment to Him. That’s because I don’t fully grasp that God sees His Son when He sees me. His grace is so much greater than my sin that He smiles at me and enjoys my company.  He likes my personality—He created it—and I am the only creature like me. Even though He knows me inside and out and all of my history and my every thought and failure, He delights in me, and I must choose to believe it because He is not a liar. He tells me all of this in His word and I have to purposely choose to believe it instead of believing that He is as disappointed in me as I am.

Toward the end of our anniversary weekend, I told Jeff to “say something anniversary.” He came right back with “You still thrill me.” Knowing myself, that’s hard to believe, but he is very convincing and I blush to enjoy his delight in me. 

_The Education Of A Gardener_

My goal to read a book a month in 2020 and my newfound interest in gardening collided in my discovery of The Education of A Gardener by Russell Page (1906-1985). I read an accomplished landscape architect’s tribute to this book on Instagram which included a photo of his copy with its tattered edges. He credited it as one of his earliest inspirations and educators on the subject of gardening. The book was written by a master in the field of gardening and is used as a textbook (complete with an index) in landscape architecture classes so it seemed a good place for me to begin my study. I knew it might take me to lofty places of which I would never need to know, but it also would give me a good foundational acquaintance with the necessary terms I would soon encounter.

After reading two prefaces, a foreword, and a twenty-eight-page introduction, I feared this might not be that thrilling of a read as there was much detail given of the author’s projects which led up to the writing of the book. I suppose so much prologue is necessary in a legendary work whose followers beg for details of its genesis. However, when I crossed into Chapter One the reading became even slower, not because of lack of interest or difficulty in understanding, but because of the time it took me to go back and underline all the remarkable lines I now read. I basically read those passages twice. It was evident that Mr. Page had fully been taught by the garden and he was well able to articulate his knowledge. I started to wonder how he could keep up this pace of imparting wisdom for three hundred more pages.

“I have to keep three dimensions always in my mind and indeed the gardener ’s fourth—growth in time. ”

— Russell Page, p.68

The author’s main point is to instruct garden designers to keep in mind the goals of suitability, simplicity, unity, and relaxation. He knew well how to do complicated designs but they did not accomplish the purpose of a garden. The beauty was achieved when the choices were fitting for the area and the owner. This exercises a mastery of knowledge used for the ultimate enjoyment of a garden.

“I have always tried to shape gardens each as a harmony, linking people to nature, house to landscape, the plant to its soil.”

— Russell Page, p.13

With the reading of this book, I have adopted the practice of circling a word I don’t know, looking it up, and writing beside it the shortest definition possible, sometimes drawing a sketch.  This will help me to review and further cement the word in my mind when I flip back through and read the things I’ve marked. 

Here are some of the words I met in this book:

faience—glazed ceramic ware

cloyingly—distastefully excessive

apposite—apt

insuperable—impossible to overcome

corymbs—long outer stems

propinquity—proximity

racemes—flower stalks along a central stem

pall—to lose strength or attraction

parapet—short protective wall

coppice—trees trained to branch from the stump creating a wall

sward—area of grass

palimpsest—each style overlaid by its successor

quinquennial—every 5 years

welter—a confused mass

copse—small group of trees

becks—mountain streams

I noticed the European spelling of some words such as centre, colour, and meagre and that what we call a lupine in North America is a lupin in Europe and Australia. I got familiar with some of the nomenclature used for plants such as calling a Japanese maple an acer and calling foxgloves digitalis. 

“…The most striking and satisfying visual pleasure comes from the repetition or the massing of one simple element.”

— Russell Page, p. 147

One thing this book imparted to me is an appreciation of trees.  I have known of quite a few types of trees in the past but for the most part I would say that trees have just been background to me.  Now, just riding down the street as a passenger I find it so interesting to look at the trees—which kinds and when they are at their peaks and how big they get and their interesting leaves and bark and shape and how they are pruned and when they bloom. I can appreciate better the years it takes to grow a full-grown tree and all the things that had to go well for that to happen. Trees provide boundaries, structure, beauty, and shade to our gardens. I can identify so many more trees now than I could before I read this book, partly because I finally put names to trees that I have seen for years but not known what to call them.  To know is to enjoy.

“…Trees will be the raw materials with which you will construct a landscape or a garden…You must learn to know them from as many aspects as you can. ”

— Russell Page, p. 173

In the second half of the book, Page talked about making gardens in different areas of the world.  He mentioned festivals in which he participated which took a year of work and duly noted how some huge bets didn’t pay off and left him scrambling and begging off of friends to prevent a public disaster, like finding in February that thousands of tulip bulbs planted for a spring show had rotted. THERE’S a lesson that we all can use, in the garden and everywhere else. 

“If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it.”

— Russell Page, p. 47

But I discovered probably the most useful part of the book in the final chapter and no doubt the other chapters prepared me for it. The whole book was about Russell Page’s work in other people’s gardens, but the final chapter laid out his plan if he were to plan a garden of his own, which he never did. To get the final word on what he had gleaned from all of his many experiences was pure gold.  He knew the expense and upkeep of complicated garden designs.  He saw all the work and money that went into creating WOW gardens whose owners rarely even entered them. His final word on gardening was that it should create a quiet harmony. In planning his own garden, he would avoid dramatic strokes of attention-getting colors like red, orange, and fuchsia and use pale colors instead. Quiet harmony. Ironically, I come away from this book shouting in my head “QUIET HARMONY.” Yes, I agree.  We need quiet and we need harmony and we need to find it at home. What a beautiful and worthy gift our gardens have the power to give us.

“…If this intermittent vision becomes a reality…it will be satisfying for like all gardens it will be a world for itself and for me.”

— Russell Page, p. 363

Perhaps you can glean the benefits of this book from just reading my review, but if you want to read it for yourself, I would suggest reading chapters 1-7 and 13. That cuts out one hundred twenty-five pages that mostly list which plants he used in different scenarios, many of which I could not picture: great information for a career landscape designer but TMI for the rest of us. Still I can say that I am glad I read this book and hope that the principles I learned from it will be evident in the creation of my future gardens and in my appreciation of the plant world.

“A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise.”

— Russell Page, p. 359

For the Love of Flowers

My love affair with flowers has been a constant vine through my life. Ever since I was a little girl, whether I was choosing a notebook, a dress, a wallpaper, or a china pattern, I wanted the one with flowers on it.  

I can’t get over their beauty.  You can put one flower in a vase and it’s beautiful.  You can put a bunch of the same flower in a vase—beautiful.  Put flowers together that are as opposite from each other as they could possibly be—beautiful.  Simple flowers, complex flowers, grocery store flowers, flowers shipped from faraway countries—they are all beautiful.  I can’t get over them and I never will.

I can study a flower or a flower arrangement the same way I have learned to study a piece of art.  Look at the details.  The color fades perfectly from intense saturation to white. See how putting greenery next to it brings out the color?  What an unusual shape! It’s just sitting there being beautiful and that is reason enough for its existence.  It will be beautiful if I’m having a good day or a bad day.  It makes my home a lovely place to be, instantly elevating a lifeless room to a LIVING room.

“But flowers cost money and then they die.  What a waste!”

My husband has always been one to do things big.  Many years ago, he would order an arrangement for our anniversary that cost $75 or more.  They were beautiful, but, at the same time, a pity that they lasted such a short time and too costly to buy them more often.  Then grocery stores started carrying bouquets for $25 and under.  I convinced my husband that I would rather have a $5 grocery store bouquet every month than a $75 arrangement once a year.  He agreed and has been spotted walking in the door with flowers in hand on many occasions since.  I think he enjoys having them around the house as much as I do.  We are both enjoying my 30th anniversary gift of a monthly bouquet subscription.  It was a great idea of his to make the celebration last all year.

I have long wanted a cutting garden. To arrange flowers for my home is a great joy, but to grow my own flowers to arrange—THAT’s next level.  If I love them at maturity, how much more would I love them if I watched them GROW to maturity?! I am just starting to learn about growing flowers, but if I fail and decide it is not for me, I will just buy flowers from people who know how to grow them.  I don’t think money is wasted on flowers.  The fact that they are beautiful for such a short time emphasizes the fact that enjoying today is worth the expense.  For a girl who is constantly planning for the future, it is a great exercise for me to stop and smell the roses today.  It reminds me that there is beauty in this day, not just a day I am looking forward to down the road. Today used to be the day I looked forward to. The grass withers and the flowers fall, and this day will die and fade away, too.  I want to enjoy it by having joy in it and marvel at what is marvelous. 

These zinnias are the first flowers I grew.

I grew the hydrangea, foxglove, zinnia, nepeta, and forget-me-nots.

When I look at a flower arrangement or a painting—I mean stop and really look at it—my thoughts quickly turn to the artist that created it.  What skill is exhibited in bringing the elements together to express thoughts and emotions without a word! The creation is the expression of the creator and is only a sample of how complex and fascinating its creator is.

My children have also gifted me with flowers. What could be more lovely?!

Other than my loved ones’ faces, I can’t think of anything more beautiful to me than flowers.  I want them in my life every day. No doubt there will be some at my funeral. We can think of no more beautiful thing for honoring a loved one and recognizing the transition from earth to heaven than with flowers, a fascinating living thing that grew for a time, did its part, and returned to dust. 

 I think flowers are love notes from God—little glimpses of the beauty of His presence.

~ Yes, flowers must be the stuff of heaven. ~