Pretend Flowers

This is a view looking out our patio.  If you look below the oriole feeder, you'll see the creek that rambles through our back yard on its way to a river.  The hardware-cloth screen that you see toward the bottom protects the rest of the patio screen and gives the fuzzy one freedom to jump up on it when she says her farewells to people who come visit us.

If the sprinkling can intrigues you, at first glance it did me, too.  Walking up and down the aisles of a Good Will Store, hunting for a treasure, the mosaic sprinkler did everything but jump in my shopping cart.  Love at first sight is a fore sure thing.

Most of the seasonal flowers that grace our patio and the inside of our home are fabric.  Those born with green thumbs may thump me on the head for this, but we're beyond staying home to water the flowers if we have a chance to go away for a day or several.  Hubby is the one who got stuck with vacuuming up the dried dead leaves and blossoms that fell off my hanging plants onto the floor, and that was an every-day task.  If we say we live by the motto, Simplify, Simplify, Simplify, then that's exactly what we should do.

Our 5-year-old neighbor girl came to visit us a couple weeks ago.  We were out on our screened-in patio eating 4th of July pink cupcakes with white frosting and blueberries on top, chatting, when she reached over and felt the flowers in the mosaic sprinkling can.  "Are these flowers real?"

"No," I said.  "They are fabric flowers, and the reason we have them is because we aren't here all the time to take care of them properly.  If we don't water them, they will dry up and die."

"So, they're pretend flowers, right?"

"Yes, I guess they are pretend flowers."

We kept on talking about other things, and then she paused, looked at me and said, "Someday I'm going to have pretend flowers, too, cuz I think yours are pretty."

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PHOTO OF THE DAY
Portable Picnic Table