Orange Geraniums

I strive for elegance but often overshoot the mark and end up striving for excellence. And I fail.
Sometimes that leaves me so deflated that I greet the morning with a sense of overwhelm and despair. I would love to meet the dawn with a smile and an expectation of good things. Rarely, I do. I have a role model for this ideal: my Granny Boggild.

She was tall and thin and always well put together. She wore orange cable knit cardigans with pearls, and sat in her wing back chair in front of her stone fireplace, knitting and watching tennis on her small television with the view of the lake behind it. In the window boxes that lined her wooden deck, she'd planted orange and yellow geraniums. I should probably add that she also wore pants, usually cream coloured, lest you get the wrong image stuck in your mind.
As time passes since Granny's passing, I realize that I remember her in colours: her blue and white bedroom, her silky light sweaters of orange, pale blue, or brilliant deep green. Her cottage was beige and olive green with accents of color here and there. Her hair was light reddish brown until the day she died at 92 years old.
Yellow painted wicker chairs sat in the screened in porch on the green painted wooden floor. We would sit together there and knit and drink Earl Grey tea while discussing other people who we really hoped would get their lives together.
Her kitchen glowed deep yellow with a red and black rooster lamp on her tiny wooden table for two. Long ago we perched there together on chilly mornings eating slightly burnt whole wheat toast with homemade strawberry jam when it was too early for my Mom and brother to get up. Later I sat there holding my cocker spaniel puppy, talking to her about my life and my puppy and she smiled and shook her head in advance sympathy and told me how it's so hard, we get so attatched to our puppies. She was right.
Not so long ago I sat there trying to burn the image of her and her kitchen into my brain. I did that with all of the rooms in her cottage and boathouse. I knew that she would leave us, it would all be changed and if I let it, it would fade.

Happy Birthday Granny. I bet that even if Heaven was all white when she arrived, it's got orange geraniums now.