FINDING BULBS

A few days ago, I helped my wife find old buried flower bulbs from the summer season, and it taught me a lesson about how to look for the things that last in my life. She loves her flowers, and therefore she loves the bulbs that bring them to blossom year after year. We are moving soon, and I’m sure she never once considered just abandoning the bulbs and buying new ones for our new house’s garden. Those buried bulbs were treasures to her, and, with my slight help with a shovel, and with a constant expression of fervor and hopefulness, she resurrected several dozen of them. As I was digging and watching her hold up her dusty treasures with gladness, I thought to myself, I should also be looking for bulbs. There are riches in my life that lie, overlooked and disregarded, under the soil of busy days and passing years. There are thoughts like old buried bulbs, thoughts that could throw lights over everything I do if only I would work a little to lift them up again, like my wife lifted up her beloved flower bulbs. There are long-lost feelings of resolve and zeal waiting to be wiped clean and set down again inside my life, to sprout and blossom once more. It just takes yearning and doggedness, and of course a lot of the kind of limitless love my wife showed as she brushed away the soil and smiled at bulb after precious bulb.