SA-TUR- DAY Night!

Probably one of my all-time favorite songs and a nostalgic one at that!  It also helps that the Bay City Rollers were a favorite of my older siblings and I remember well looking at the album cover while rocking out to this song as a very young child!  I dug the plaid!

I'm sitting here on a Saturday night working on a few things online when my inbox starts filling up with Facebook notifications: " tagged you a photo of you on Facebook."  I know well where this could lead, but I'm not exactly sure where this trip down memory lane will begin.  You see, I met this FB friend at age 6 and remained good friends with her all the way through to grade 12, the possibilities are endless, I toggle over a tab or two to my Facebook page. 

The photos are classic, some are blurry, but as I find my face in each image, my mind is flooded with reflections of the way life used to be.  Yes, that was an intentional reference to a song lyric and yes, I intentionally chose the China Beach intro as my representation for the classic song by The Supremes.   I am no fool, I knew this song on its own before its use as a theme song, but you see for me memories are as closely linked to music as they are to photographs.  And where these photos leave off and this lyric kicks in is about the time that one of my favorite television show debuted.

It has been an odd memory week.  I was scrolling through some of my Facebook photos earlier in the week and a photo that I took of driftwood on the shoreline in 2010 led me to scroll through an album with much older photos. 

I was on the hunt for one from 1979 also taken at the shore, but more specifically on the steps of my grandparents' home.  It is a photo of me sitting with my Pop-Pop in 1979, mere months before he passed away.  I was 4 and intensely aware of how much I was loved - you can see it in the way I am sitting next to him, his arm around my waist, pulling me in closer.  He is seen in profile, so engaged in the moment with me, but I can imagine the smile on his face and the twinkle in his kind eyes.  I remember all of this, but there is no song with this photo or any of my memories of him, just a song in my heart that remembers well how loved I was by him...

Blog Clearing House

Letters I wrote never meaning to send...well in this case they are blog posts that were started and left as drafts.  If you see a flurry of posts in the next few days and topics don't seems to match the date, it is because I am polishing up some of those drafts and sharing them with you.  So Father's Day flower conversation on March 6 is just the beginning of this clearing house! 

Pineapples too Cute to Eat

Flowers for Fathers?  Yes.  When your Dad is the biggest teddy bear you know and your Father-in-Law is an avid gardener, it makes perfect sense to pull together fragrant bouquets in their honor.

As hostess of breakfast for my Dad and a guest at my in-law's table for dinner on Father's Day, I wanted to create  centerpieces to dress the tables at which meals would be shared to honor the Dads in my life.


The selection of flowers at my local Produce Junction was limited, but inspiration struck when I reconsidered the plastic tubs nearest the entrance that were bursting with tall, proud sunflowers!  The sunflowers triggered memories of flowers and arrangements I had seen while visiting my Father-in-Law's South American birthplace, Colombia, in the Fall of 2005.

With inspiration from that trip, I made a second lap around the fresh flower section and selected some tropical accompaniments for the sunflowers, ginger blossoms and birds-of-paradise.  Perfect.  It seemed my vision was complete, but then I spotted the cutest floral fillers ever - dwarf pineapples! 

Have you ever seen them?  They were the perfect finishing touch and both Dads were pleased as punch with their Father's Day flowers!