When I drove down to the Dallas Arboretum the day after Christmas for one last visit to the Chihuly Exhibit I took a series of photographs of The Dallas Star, the Crepe Myrtle Allee, and the Toad Corners Fountain beyond. They look much different, though still really attractive, in the leafless winter.

“When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.”

― Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

The Dallas Star

I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I’m going to miss the Chihuly.

“We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested.

The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid.

And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.”

― Daniel Abraham, The Price of Spring

Crepe Myrtle Allee, Dallas Arboretum

(Click for a larger and more detailed version on Flickr)

I remember a long, long time ago, talking to a girl. I was talking about how much I liked the life-renewing rains of spring, she replied that she liked the storms of autumn. She liked the excitement, the change, the promise of hard times to come… but not quite here yet. It took me a couple of days of thinking about what she had said to understand that she was right and how unique and interesting her way of looking at things is.

It took me too long, she left me for somebody else. She may be long gone, but I still remember what she said. I will remember it on the day I die.

Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.

― Sarah Ban Breathnach

(Click for a larger and more detailed version on Flickr)

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets