Five Minute Friday: View

Love this community of writers!  Fridays are my favorite...

Joining Lisa-Jo and the Five Minute Friday community today.  When I saw the prompt for today, View, this story from years ago popped into my mind.

Here are my five minutes (OK, it took me a bit longer than five minutes today):

In the Spring, she breezed through our offices, buckets of daffodils in hand, leaving vases crammed full of cheerfulness on our desks.  She was old enough to be my Mom, but had the energy and verve of a woman half her age.  Sitting on her screened in porch and listening to the summer rain, she taught me to knit.  Her dogs were her babies, and in my friendship with her, I glimpsed a life lived to the full.  She was a master gardener, a skilled knitter, with a contagious laugh and a generous spirit.

The daffodils were gathered from the thousands she planted on her property in the outskirts of Madison, WI.  One day we drove out there together so she could give me a tour.  Her gardens were breathtaking, looking both cultivated and perfectly natural alongside the wooded setting of her tri-level home.   At the back of the house, she showed me one of her favorite things: the outdoor shower.  It was a new concept for me.  I stood there on the wooded deck, looking at the shower head coming out of the house wall, the loofah hanging from a hook, the shampoo bottle in the caddy…and I felt a kind of shock and awe, realizing that the woods surrounding the house were the only shower curtains to be had.

I pictured that special, secluded place again months later when my friend told me that her neighbors decided to cut down the stand of trees shielding her yard from theirs.  She joked that she was going to continue her habit of outdoor showering so they would wish they had never cut down those trees.  At least, I think she was joking.

  

Perhaps her neighbors were like me,  desperate for a clearer view. I want to see what is on the other side of the obstacles in my path.  I imagine it will be so lovely, the view beyond what I can see. 

Then in my mind I see one of my friends’ neighbors waking early one morning, opening the curtain to survey his lovely view, and getting more of a view than he bargained for.  I laugh.  And I decide that I am just fine here with my obstructed view, waiting for things to clear up at the right time.