Category: Self-Improvement

It’s funny how you can follow watercolor painting step-by-step directions and mess up big, but you can fix problems with parts of a painting never meant to be there in the first place. Like a really dark green leaf that comes in from the right side of the page. Like life throwing curveballs.

And let’s talk about placement – – my red cap on the larger shroom is supposed to be tilted down, but it looks more like a UFO hovering over the stem. And yet I sit here laughing about it all. The irony here is that if you look at the tip behind the leaves, it’s a reminder not to be afraid of mistakes – – but to see them as happy accidents. Like a wrong turn that takes you to the best slice of pie you’ve ever had.

It’s okay. It’s all okay. …….I’m journeying and embracing process over product. No one is framing my work, and I’m celebrating anyway.

And I like my stems and under-shrooms, so something turned out okay.

It’s fine, everything’s fine.

I’ll fix the rest of this fungi in retirement if I feel like it. And instead of chuckling, I’ll be belly laughing!

Mushrooms

Somehow or other, orchids are on a whole elevated level in the world of flowers. I think that even my father, who called hydrangeas “hydrangulas” in his final days, knew this. He distinguished himself and his friends, socially, by the esteemed class of this flower. As he talked about his dating days and how he earned money for the movies and dances selling crawfish he and his cousin Porky had caught in the Okefenokee Swamp, he made it clear that they were not “orchid guys,” as if the high school boys in Waycross, Georgia had circles of their own like Greasers and Socs in The Outsiders. In July of 2025, the month following his death in June, I shared the stories he had told us as my brother and I sat at his bedside – – many of them recorded so that others, too, could hear him tell all about the good old days. All those stories and recordings that I shared are on the right hand side of my blog page in the July 2025 tab.

Remembering that Dad was not “an orchid guy” on the heels of a weekend on St. Simons as my brother and I are still cleaning out the house, I’m here to tell you that he was right about that. Orchids take a lot of care, and Dad spent a lifetime collecting things that gathered dust and went unrepaired. You can flippantly toss a carnation around and it’ll last for days in a kitchen windowsill, but one cross look at an orchid and it will lose its petals and wither. Dad was a carnation guy – – not an orchid guy. And nearly one year later, I understand more about why he was not an orchid guy than I did when he first told the story.