A Trail of Tulip Petals

The day before Mother’s Day, the beautiful pink tulips I had purchased earlier in the week for Book Club were sad and drooping. As I carried the vase from the kitchen to the trashcan in the backyard, I left a trail of tulip petals.

“Buying flowers is dumb,” Timothy said as he came up behind me with a handful of petals. “You buy them, and they die two days later.”

I laughed and told him he would change his mind when he had a girlfriend.

But evidently I had been set up because the next day, Mother’s Day, Timothy gave me a Lego Wildflower Bouquet, part of Lego’s Botanical Collection series. 

“See?” Timothy said with a grin. “Flowers forever.”

So later that afternoon, while the guys watched the Celtics game, I built my Lego Wildflower Bouquet which included Leatherleaf Fern, Queen Anne’s Lace, Welsh Poppy, Cornflower, Lavender, Lupin, Larkspur, and Gerbera Daisy. Each flower used repurposed Lego pieces: the palm leaf element was originally in a Pirate set, a car hub was used for the stigma at the center of the Welsh Poppy, the Lupin’s petals were pirate hats, and the petals of the Gerbera Daisy were oars.

For two hours I worked on the bouquet, creating flowers that were copies of the real thing. And sitting at the kitchen table, with a cup of tea beside me and Legos spread out in an archipelago of colors, I marveled how God created a world full of the amazingly intricate, fiercely delicate, and breathtakingly beautiful.

As much as we like to live life big, to shoot for the moon and reach for the stars, sometimes life is about the details pulling us down to earth reminding us of things that are part of a whole—glistening raindrops on a spider’s web, dust motes in a sunbeam, a dragonfly on water, a lizard in a mailbox ...

and a trail of tulip petals.