Years ago women often met at the fence between them while they were planting flowers. The method was something like this…..if she had something you admired she would dig some up and pass over the fence. The home we had when the children grew up was sadly lacking for landscaping. I had grown up watching grandma work in her flowers and my mother planting things “from the home place.”

Over the years I brought things home from grandma Strain, grandma Stricklett, my mother and friends. Our gardens were very personal because everything came from someone else. Such a thing was true of my bleeding hearts.

An older friend who was the age I am now, brought me some bleeding hearts to plant, telling me where to put them for optimum growth and blooms. Over the years when they needed separating I gave them to other friends and my mother. As it so happened years later when we moved to Missouri next door to mom and dad, she brought some “starts” for me and I have had them ever since.

They are beautiful to me. The little “hearts” make me think of all the people I am bonded with because of them. I appreciate that they are some of the first blooms of the season and I can enjoy them more.

Some flowers, like the bleeding hearts, seem frail in the early spring when weather is cruel, but in deference to that the plants hold their blooms long enough to reproduce the next year.

I want to be like that. In the storms of life I want to be pleasing to others and resilient enough to continue on no matter the weather or circumstances……….the message is clear. What we give away will return to us in due time.

Essentially Esther