On the Picking of Flowers

One of the many frustrations I have with living where we do is my inability to allowing my children to pick flowers.  Everywhere we walk, almost every flower that we see "belongs" to someone's yard, or some state park's grounds, or some other "no picking" zone.  The girls ooh and ahh over lovely spring flowers and I am looking over my shoulder hoping an annoyed neighbor or a park attendant doesn't see us just at the moment my girls are uncontrollably grasping and pulling.

We don't have many flowers in our yard.  There is one early spring pink flowering bush and several azalea bushes.  Rosebud especially just combs through the lower branches of the bush, picking each flower and bud in delight.    While a large part of me does wince at the wilting piles of pink buds she leaves in her wake, I try very hard not stop her.

There is something about flowers.  There's something about their beauty, their scent and their color that seem to compell one, especially if one is little and gifted with wonder, to hold and caress (or dissect :) and have a part of that beauty for oneself.  I fully understand that for a child it can be impossible to look without touching, smell without possessing and admire without grasping.  

Some days, coming home from walks where I have chastised and explained, trying to save the daffodils or crocuses or hyacinths  (or "bleeding hearts" or hydrangea or bluebells) on private or public grounds, I am hit by one of the reasons that I really miss home. 

I miss our acre full of violets and dandelions, buttercups and Queen Anne's Lace.  I miss the lush, full bushes of lilacs.  I miss the honeysuckle and the wild roses.

I miss the uncultivated and unhampered outdoors, the wealth of freedom that living in the country would offer my children  I wish that they could daily experience and enjoy the outdoors, and the flowers, the way I am sure that God meant for them to be enjoyed -- through the full, sensorial, grasping delight that little hands do best. 

I want them to be able to pick the flowers.