As I was packing up school lunches, I read the “communications” book my daughter comes home with every day. It is a green notebook with notes from her teacher about school. It’s quite a good system. If there’s a field trip, or special dress day, or a note I need to send to the teacher, I write in it. I try to glance at it immediately after every school day in case there’s an assignment for me “to do.” I forgot to look Friday, and I paid for it. Sunday night I had to trudge to the market and get a loaf of bread and a jar of jelly for a gift basket for the school’s janitor and lunch lady.

The supermarket was jammed. Why? I thought. Shouldn’t all you people be home on a Sunday night? Especially since it is pouring rain!! It took me ten minutes to find a place to park. I bumped into people up and down the isles, checked out, flipped my sweatshirt hood back up, and walked back to the car.

As the rainy season starts, we get a few good downpours as if mother nature says: Remember me? Do you remember where your umbrella is? When I’m without the kids, I often go without the umbrella and just get a little wet. The flowers here provide a lesson in durability. The delicate ones eventually wash away. A great many like the heliconias have a waxy skin that lets the rain roll off it’s back, much like a duck. Their roots will bind up a clump of dirt so hard, it would take a backhoe to get them out. For a long time, I sought books as one of my greatest teachers. Can’t get enough of them. As Heinrich Mann said:

A house without books is like a room without windows.

They offer insights and vision into the world.

And flowers? This is the world we are. If the world were filled with flowers, maybe we could be as grounded as they are and all that discomfort would just roll off our backs, even on Sunday nights in search of raspberry jelly.