favorite things 1: gerbera daisies and not wearing shoes

(Click the photo to find out what this is all about. Also, um, hi. I’m resurrecting my blog for real.)

It’s an old joke, one that you’ve probably read here once upon a time, and it is that since one half of my family is from Yemen and the other half of my family is from Arkansas, I am probably the only Arab redneck you will ever know. Being an Arab redneck means that I say “y’all” and I talk with my hands a lot and I don’t like wearing shoes. As soon as I walk into my house, my shoes come off. Part of that may be a leftover from my childhood spent among Arab immigrants, in that it’s rude to wear shoes inside the house, but another part of it is that as much as I like shoes (and I do like them, especially when they are pretty), I don’t like wearing them. Not one bit. Not at all. And so it is that when the weather is warm enough for me to wander around outside of the house barefoot, that’s what I do. I like the feel of the ground directly beneath my feet. I like the feeling of cool grass and hot concrete and warm dirt. I like feeling where I stand.

I like my flower beds and how they are daily reminders, right outside of the front windows, that things are beautiful and alive and that everything is temporary. The flowers, they start as tiny green shoots at the earliest hint of spring, and they grow taller, they bloom and die, bloom and die. Nothing lasts. It’s a powerful truth I’ve been thinking about a lot lately; I guess I could say I’ve been meditating on it, if I were one for meditation. It’s been hitting home in a lot of ways, some of which are uplifting and some others are terribly sad, but knowing this, that nothing lasts, that everything is temporary, brings an incredible peace: give me right now, because damn, it is beautiful.

And those gerbera daisies, so brazenly colorful. This year’s selections are pink and orange, and as you can see here, I’m standing next to the orange ones. I said I didn’t need them when I saw them at the nursery, but then, some things aren’t really about need, are they? They make me smile when I look at them, and that is good enough.

It’s 80 degrees today in Michigan, as perfect as it gets in terms of days to be outdoors, barefooted, rocking back on my heels in the warm dirt of one of the flower beds, taking a photo and using my copy of the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic as a makeshift tripod, smiling at the person riding by on a bicycle who stares at me like I’m crazy. Yep. As perfect as it gets.