Bougainvillea

The morning after my arrival was Monday, April 12, 2010, and since then I have been picking beautiful bougainvillea plants and have put them in a vase on the kitchen table together with little yellow wildflowers.

The site of these beautiful bougainvilleas keeps transporting me to my childhood home which sat as the top of a T street, the vertical part of the T had bougainvillea plants on the gates of a garden overlooking the street.

One day, mom and I went picking some so I can take them to the teacher the next day.

I gave my flowers to the teacher and she put them in a vase on top of the cabinets where we put our lunch boxes and jackets. A few minutes later they were replaced by leftover flowers from a wedding the previous day. Flowers people paid money for because they needed care and nurturing to grow. It doesn't matter what kind they were. Pick one. So my flowers ended up in the garbage because nobody had paid any money for them. They grew around wildly without much care and came with their own leaves and stems. They didn't need arrangements to look beautiful.

My consolation was that no matter how sad they looked in the garbage, they still looked more beautiful than the ones in the vase.

Everytime my roommate here sees these flowers in the vase, she smiles and says "they are beautiful".

I have come a long way since kiddygarden.