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Health & Fitness

Fresh Flowers

Today I am grateful for fresh flowers.  I went to the Peter Becker Retirement Community annual flower show and got a little taste of Spring.

 

Because my kitchen is a terra cotta color, I was looking for tall daffodils, but they didn’t have any so I bought three plants whose name I can’t remember.  I was looking for a cloth to set them on and couldn’t find the one from Arizona that I wanted.

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John found the orange one with multi-colored cross-stich, thinking it was what I was looking for.  It wasn’t, but I’m happy to use it, because it’s from an old friend from Indonesia.

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Ibu Zaineuden was the oldest person I met in Jakarta.  She lived up the street from me and at 78 she still tended her own garden.  She also spoke perfect English, which meant that she could enlighten me on her culture better than anyone else.  And she did. We had long, long conversations about education (not available to enough people), government (power can be intoxicating, especially for corrupt people), families (all women of any religion or country want basically the same thing), and health (never take it for granted). Her husband had been on the administration of President Sukarno back in the day and her stories of that era were endless.  I don’t remember all of them any more but I do remember Ibu Zaineuden. 

 

She was small, looked frail and had whispy white hair, gnarled, arthritic knuckles and a constant smile.  She was the strongest woman I’ve ever met, confident and sure with an aura of peace surrounding her.  She wore traditional Indonesian batik all the time, much of it faded and worn thin from constant washing.  She never wore regular shoes because her feet were too crippled from arthritis.  Even with flip-flops, she could not put her toes through the thong because the toes on the right pointed northeast and the toes on the left pointed northwest.  The flip- flops wedged against the knob where her big toe should have been.  She never complained.  Ever.

 

When she gave me the hand-cross-stitched cloth, she told me it was one of the last ones she had made.  I tried to refuse, saying that she should save it for someone special and she said she had, and pushed it into my hands. 

 

The flowers and cloth remind me Spring will come eventually and are as perfect in my kitchen as Ibu Zaineuden is in my heart.

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