Ready for a Change

I usually try to make this blog's photo illustration actually illustrate something I'm trying to say. Rarely, though, is the day's picture filled with such on-the-nose symbolism as these sad-looking carnations.

These are the flowers that were part of the Easter dessert table. No, I'm not so fancy that I have a dessert table at every meal, but Easter dinner comes hard on the heels of the final Easter cantata warm-up, the cantata presentation itself, and the triumphal worship service. It's a lot of crashing chords for the piano player (moi) and a dessert table can be assembled the night with the carrot cake positioned a handy arms-length from where my tired self is planted for dinner.

Anyway, I had a cheery bouquet of red carnations and yellow something-or-others decorating the dessert table, and the table had a lovely spring-ish feel.

But Easter morning also featured a winter reboot that ushered in the final hectic weeks of tax season, and music contest season, and my women's spring plant fundraiser for which I happily devise copious spreadsheets of orders and vendors and  how many flats of mixed vincas need to be delivered to which customer and which buyer gets red impatiens.

All of these are good things, as Martha Stewart and I like to point out, with the exception  of the winter reboot. (Curse you, winter reboot and hard freeze that shriveled the foliage of my day lilies.) I love music contest season and its thrill of victory and agony of defeat. The flower sales are the only fundraisers I've ever participated in that make me feel like a better person. (Flowers! Education for women!) And until the two final days of tax season when I serve as the office intern (I make coffee and  mistakes) my involvement is mostly limited to telling my favorite CPA "Bye, dear! I'll see you in  the morning!" as Husband leaves for the office again every night after supper.

I had plenty of time to replenish the blossoms in the yellow vase but there was cinnamon tea to drink and a new season of The Last Kingdom on Netflix that I had to get watched before the return to remote-sharing, and some things just did not get done. Blogging. Taking down the dessert table. Throwing away the Easter flowers.

The carnations and something-or-others were hardy until just a few days ago, when I took this shot. Then I left them two more days before I threw them into the composter. It felt like the proper symbolic gesture:

No more winter reboots, please. We're ready for spring.