potential

They sat outside the greenhouse fence. Scrawny. Abandoned. An email had announced, "Plant sale leftovers. Bring a box and they're yours."

I'm not authorized to bring home stray animals, but my landscape design loving husband welcomes almost any form of needy plant life. So three leggy sunflower starts found their way to my back seat and home without delay. As luck would have it, my handsome gardener was in the yard when we arrived and planted those seemingly identical seedlings within the hour.

They could not be more different. The first to bloom in July, once towering at over 12 feet with an enormous face, now slumps forward at half the height weighed down with seed. The second, blossoming in sometime in August, was a dwarf in comparison-- slender, classic, lovely at matbe four feet-- and was selected from the yard as the centerpiece for my birthday bouquet last week. (Bittersweet, given how attached I'd become to its watch over the front path.)

And then there's this bashful bloom. Here we are, mid-September, taking its time. Each inch of the stalk seems to have savored the journey. Each artful aspect unfolding in its own sweet, reluctant leisure.

Hurumph.

Rushing around as I am, reacquainting myself with the rhythm of the school year, I envy the time it has to simply stand in the sunshine, yawning, slowly stretching into life.

Will I ever learn to simply be?