SPRINKLING PIXIE DUST

When my grandparent’s property sold back in 1995, I dug up my grandmother’s peony and planted it in my own garden - a reminder of a woman I have long admired. When our house sold, and we were going to be renting for a year, I moved it to my parent’s back garden. With the next move, it found a new home, and has with each subsequent property I’ve lived in ever since – and there have been more than a few of those.

A while back, I returned to a house that we lived in years ago, one that I couldn’t see my way clear to selling. Wonderful tenants had taken care of it, and there has been a gratifying sense of coming home.

The peony pictured here is from my grandparent’s garden … yet not the one that I moved from place to place, but rather what was ‘left behind’. You see it’s often impossible to get the entire plant any time you dig one up, invariably there is a root or a fledgling shoot that remains, and plants are tenacious. Their sole purpose is to grow, to bloom, to return to the soil, wait out the winter, and then begin the entire process all over again the following spring.

Watching it bloom, I have this beautiful image of peony bushes, scattered like pixie dust around the city, remnants of my time at each property, and small memorials to my grandparent’s garden of long ago.

We are like that too. We arrive in a place, or in the presence of another, and small parts of us are left behind when we depart. Those encounters can be significant, life-altering, like the roots put down in marriage, others are fleeting, like the smile of a stranger, or a shared moment at a party. But a part of you remains in each of those moments, whether deeply rooted or ephemeral.

At the end of the day, we get to decide how we carry what's left behind. We can choose to be armoured in anger, or light with joy.

As the sun touches the blooms of this beautiful peony, I am choosing to hold things lightly as I let my heart be filled with gratitude for all that has been, and all that is yet to come.