Letter: The Flower on the Floor

I clapped along with the others as employees were recognized for their outstanding leadership over the past year.

Bouquets were presented, pictures taken, hugs, smiles, and laughter predominated.

Among the last to head in the direction others had gone to partake of refreshments, I noticed a single flower on the tile floor.

Absentmindedly I picked it up and at first thought I’d put it in the button hole of my shirt. I had another meeting to go to and figured it would be fun to go in style. However, there was no stem, nothing to keep it in place. Evidently the blossom had broken from the stem when it had somehow been knocked from the others in the bouquet and the flower had fallen to the floor where those cleaning up after would sweep it up disposing of it along with the crumbs from the cookies.

As celebrating people passed by, I stooped and retrieved the flower from the floor.

Wandering past the cookies, I headed toward the garbage can.

Then I looked again at this single beautiful little yellow rose and thought it too exquisite, too perfect, even as if it were possible almost shyly smiling back at me, to simply toss it in the trash.

Sure, it was just a flower, one of many after all, but all of a sudden it had personality, delicate beauty, a specialness all its very own.

I think love and life are like that.

You find someone perhaps who others have passed by, precious. Smiling, you think how delightful to place next to your heart, but somehow their brokenness prevents them from occupying that space.

Hand-in-hand with my single beautiful little flower, I wandered outside and placed that delicate yellow rose in a bush of some other kind of flowers.

There, for a brief time at least until it wilted like all flowers do, this single beautiful little yellow rose could show, in a setting where no others were like her, how beautiful she was.

Where passers by would notice, and smile.