What Price Summer?

Today we find ourselves enjoying the midwinter "thaw" - that week or so that seems to happen every year when the sun is so bright it hurts your eyes, the temperature gets above 0 and we have visions of what lies under all that snow.

I was in the local Coop store the other day and low and behold they had fresh flowers! Many of the shelves were bare due to the Alberta labor shortage that finds companies unable to find drivers for the trucks or even labour to load the groceries into the truck for delivery to the smaller centers. But there at the counter were flowers!

I was especially drawn to the Hot Pink flowers - I am usually not a Hot Pink kind of gal, but something drew me to them. Maybe visions of hot, lazy summer days when the sun is so bright it hurts your eyes and visions of snow covered gardens are a distant memory.

I wanted those flowers!

Then I looked at the price -$14.00.

$14.00!! - Yikes!!!!

Sigh.....I decided to pass on the flowers.

But.........

They would look so pretty on my Island......

Aw - what the heck - $14.00 for a taste of summer - it's a lot less than a plane ticket!

So I bought a bunch, brought them home, cut the stems and lovingly arranged them in a vase. When I unwrapped them, two stems of the hot pink flowers were wilted. I was rather disappointed, however decided to cut the stems and see if they could come back to life with a drink of water. To my surprise, those two stems are as perky and bright as all the rest of the flowers.

So for $14.00 I have a little bit of summer in the middle of winter. The flowers make me feel good and make me want to get out those gardening magazines and books and dream of those lazy summer days. My mom gave me a new gardening book, just the thing to curl up with and make plans.

For now that's all we can do - dream while $14.00 bouquets of flowers provide visions of what lies sleeping beneath the frozen ground.

So how much does summer cost?

Why a mere $14.00!