Friday, February 23, 2007

SPRING PREVIEW

By OLIVENE GODFREY

The warm weather this past week has stirred our thoughts of spring and lifted our spirits. We can can barely wait for the greenery and flowers of spring's glory. I know we will have more cold snaps but they are usually brief. I regret that old age and arthritis prevents me from planting flowers in the soil. But,I can enjoy watching the patio flowers and green plants grow in their pots.

This week, I was reminded of past springs when my late mother and I would go to a nursery and browse in the large greenhouse and select pretty bedding plants for our gardens. I usually bought a couple of flowering plants in baskets, too. We would have the backseat of my car and the trunk filled with plants. After I returned home, I hurried through my chores and on my hands and knees, I planted the little plants that would grow into beautiful flowers in the yard.

A couple of years, I planted lots of flower seeds close together in my flower bed. When they came up and burst into bloom, they were a gorgeous sight. In the fall, I let the flowers go to seed and collected the seeds in brown paper bags which my late husband, Ralph, would hang in the garage to dry. In the spring, I gave bags of seeds to relatives and they had pretty gardens from the seeds.

Last year, son Barry planted wild flower seeds in a large patio container and they were very pretty.I will enjoy planning what kind of plants I want to add to the houseplants we take out to the patio in the spring. Barry does a good job of taking care of the plants. Unfortunately, all of the spring beauty plays havoc with our allergies.

One nice thing about winter is the morning view of the sunrises coming up over the mountain that can be viewed from our front windows. When we moved here in 1978, I made a lot of pictures of the sunrises and beautiful sky from our front porch with a Ricoh 35 mm manual camera. They came out great and I had three
of the pictures enlarged and they hang on the wall of my office.
Since childhood, photography was a hobby I enjoyed as I snapped pictures of all that happened around me. Barry bought me a Minolta automatic 35 mm camera a number of years ago. But, alas, my arthritic hands have ended my picture taking.

Son Barry also has a love of photography. He had cameras all during his childhood. Now he uses a digital camera and prints his own excellent pictures. We have stacks of photo albums
of family pictures. My mother wanted to be a professional photographer when she was a girl. She said her two big brothers laughed and told her that women didn't become photographers.
She gave up her dream but made many pictures of family over the years and some of them are in our albums.

This quote was published in Hugh Park's Atlanta Journal and Constitution column February 27, 1977 but is appropriate for today--"Live within your income and you'll live without worry, " said Herman Elder,"and without a lot of other things, too."

See you next time.

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