It’s rare for me to buy fresh flowers. And by “rare” I mean darn close to never. Don’t get me wrong, I love them, but their beauty is far outweighed by the buyer’s remorse I suffer when I see them wither and die. But last week the Kroger florist made it impossible for me to pass up a bouquet of oriental lilies. They were marked down multiple times, until at $2.99 they seemed too good to be true. None of the buds had even opened yet. Score!

I love the scent of lilies and fantasized they’d have the power to absorb all the weird odors in our kitchen, turning our home into something out of a Disney movie, complete with cartoon flowers floating through the air every time we inhaled.

I brought them home, trimmed the ends, added the special packet of powder that ensures they’ll “last longer,” and stuck them in the beautiful Fostoria vase my mother gave me last summer. Then I waited. And waited. And. Waited.

Nothing.

I started thinking they’d been cut too soon and would never open – aaaaand that’s why they were $2.99. (No, I don’t know if that’s a real thing or not, but it seemed like a reasonable theory.) Still, I fell in love with them because of their potential, right? And until something turned brown and/or fell off, they still had that potential. So, those potentially beautiful lilies sat on our kitchen table for a week, their buds pale and clenched tightly closed.

Every time I walked past them, I was forced to ponder the perpetual glass is half full / half empty debate. I took great joy in finding them, bringing them home and waiting for them to open. Their not opening doesn’t change any of that. And what does it say about me that I love things for what they can become rather than what they are right now? With that thought in mind, I decided to leave them in their vase as a centerpiece of lily buds and stopped looking for them to change.

 

 

And today one of them opened.

So, I got a life lesson and a great smelling house, all for $2.99. Score!