Tulips again

I planted more tulips yesterday.  The beautiful pink tulips in front of my house have stopped blooming and I needed to replace them since they brought me inordinate amounts of joy.   I asked my neighbor to join me on my trip to the garden store.  I decided to get white tulips this time instead of pink.  I don't think I could ever replicate the beauty of those pink tulips.  And I LOVE white tulips.  So, I hope the next time I talk about this, there will be a photo of a bunch of white tulips coming out of the ground.  In the spring.

I always remember the feelings of my late drinking and early sobriety, years when I was pretty unstable.  I moved a lot.  Sometimes more than once a year.  In my first year of sobriety, I moved four times.  In the marriage to my "sober" husband, we moved sometimes more than once a month... and I never knew when we were next moving.  By that time most of my belongings were in storage.  In those  years, I would have tearful nights, just longing to live somewhere long enough to not be disoriented when I woke up in the middle of the night.  And I would think of tulips and long to have the stability to plant bulbs in the ground in the fall and be there in the spring to see the flowers emerge.

I have now had that stability long enough to no longer value it quite so much.  I am in this house for my eleventh year now.  I spent some time over the weekend cleaning closets and doing other big tasks that I am very capable of putting off for years at a time.  It helped me to value my home again.  This requires discipline - something I am still deficit in, though it pains me to admit it.

I am still grateful to have the ability to put a bulb in the ground in the autumn in the hope that I will see its fruition in the spring.

Sometimes we just have to get through the dirt and the rocks and the cold and dark times in order to get to the light and the greenness, warmth,  and the flowers of the spring.

I thank God I have been allowed the time.  Today's another 24 hours, I think I will stay sober for those hours, and I hope you do too.