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Yesterday…Bertha…challenged me to shift my focus to things that make me smile…and it didn’t take long for me to find some of them…just long enough to eat breakfast and head to work…

It’s that time of year…when buttercups begin to bloom in the South…I’ve mentioned before that these are my favorite flowers…probably because they promise that spring is about to arrive…even though they usually get dusted with snow before it does…but…it goes deeper than that…my Granny’s yard was a buttercup haven…she had rows of them by the clothes line…they were sprinkled in shrub beds…and other places around the yard…most of them had been dug up and moved from other home places…and then divided and moved around as they thickened up…new bulbs were rarely bought…just passed along…from family to family…like prized heirlooms…but…I digress…

Anyway…I go through a rural area…on my drive into work…and…there are lots of buttercups…dotting the embankments as I pass…some of them growing in nice neat rows…in front of well-established homes…and while those are nice…and do cause the corners of my mouth to curl…the ones that make me smile the most…are the ones that are just random…in the middle of a pasture…peeping out from the edge of the woods…in the ditch…with no house in sight…now those make me smile…as I wonder…where did they come from…who planted them…were they dug up and moved from another location…by some new bride…making her house…now long gone…a home…did her children proudly hand her pretty bouquets with chubby little hands of blossoms without stems…did she dig up bulbs to share with those same children when they moved into their own homes…did she take buttercups to the cemetery to mark the graves of her ancestors…

Did

And…my list of questions could go on forever…as I pass by the little patches of sunshine…wishing that I had the ability…to hear the secrets that they whisper as they nod in the breeze…instead…settling for a smile that warms my face and my life…

Jane