as good as spring itself

 

"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself."

(Ernest Hemingway)

--

She told me that she loved peonies.

So one day, after work, I dropped by her house with a handful of pink blossoms, freshly clipped.

She told me how in the old house, a farm house in the country, there were flowering peony bushes over a hundred years old. And as I drove away, I marveled: one-hundred years of the same flowers, year after year after year.