Some years ago, there was a sleep over for the female cousins on my Daddy’s side.  We had a wonderful time.  It was a sacred, heartwarming time, filled with laughter and tears.  One of the things we did that weekend was to bring something to give away that would tell something about our lives.  My cousin, Judith, had come to be with us that weekend, and it took a great deal of courage, because she really did not know us.

When the time came to share what we had brought, she brought out this greenhouse pot kind of thing with some “spear-ish” looking things in it with some stems topped with something that looked like dried blackberries.  She proceeded to introduce us to a lily that made delicate flowers and then folded up over the center and formed a blackberry looking seed inside of a parchment-looking cover.  She told the story of how her life paralleled this particular lily.  There were few dry eyes.

I was the one who got to keep the sqiggly looking things in the pot.  Some of the cousins took some seeds, and I don’t know what became of them, but I planted my little lily beside my back garage door, then transplanted it to a raised bed on the other side of the back door, and kept wondering when it would bloom.  This is my third summer with it, and very suddenly, just yesterday, I noticed that it had made a single flower (with the promise of many, many more)  I was ecstatic!

This is larger than actual size.

In other news, Bible School has been moving right along. 
The balcony houses the elementary class, and it is such a temptation to look over the edge:

This fellow is being quite contained. 
We’ve had a couple of narrow squeaks!