Pretty in Pink: Rhododendrons

I made an offer on the house that we now live in on May 7, 2004, and that offer was accepted. I was off on a cemetery stomp with my family, visiting relatives' graves several counties away. My father and oldest and youngest sisters and I took a cooler with us, full of sandwiches and pickled eggs and my mother's homemade fudge. We picnicked in cemeteries, like people did in days of old.

I came home that day to many messages on the phone, including the most important news: I got the house!!! I got it!! There had been several offers out on the house at the time, and I feared that this one, like so many of the others I had looked at, would slip from my grasp.

But it all worked out. I felt very fortunate; I closed on the house on the Friday before Memorial Day that year, and began moving in on Memorial Day weekend. I finished moving in by end of summer; in August 2004, we moved the final load out from town in my car. I got married to my husband in October 2008, and he moved in shortly after that.

On one of the first views I ever had of it, the house was surrounded by rhododendrons in bloom. The bright pink ones with posies as big as dinner plates come first. Then, a bit later, along come the purple ones and the very pale, almost white, pink ones.

Every time these bright pink ones open, I am reminded of the time that I first saw our house, and how pretty the property was, and how delighted and thrilled I was to buy it and become a homeowner. So let's let this set of lovely pink blooms set a marker for celebration: a happy memory, in which we get a home of our own in the country! Easy living, for sure!!!   :-)

You know what the soundtrack song is. It's the Psychedelic Furs, with Pretty in Pink.