My wife’s siblings along with their spouses and a few cousins trade Wordle scores daily in a lively text-message group. Not only does the daily posting connect people separated by 1000s of miles (as well as by any of a number of dividing issues), it also serves as a source for regular light-hearted conversation, musings, and family updates — a way to nurture connections that otherwise so easily fade. It has become an invaluable daily check-in, a communal namaste — unspoken but implied –through regular postings of fresh Wordle scores or an emoji celebrating another’s score.
The solution to a Wordle puzzle is a five-letter word, and a player tries to determine the five-letter word in as few guesses as possible. Cousin Bryant, who happens to live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, daily without fail, crafts a clever sentence using the solution from the previous day’s Wordle. And today, based on yesterday’s word, “scant,” he posted to the group the sentence, “Flowers are SCANT in Chattanooga this time of year.”
Bryant’s observation that flowers are scant this time of year in Chattanooga, led me to realize that in the past couple of days since returning from our two-week Christmas sojourn in Northeastern Pennsylvania, I had paid scant attention to the lovely white blooms of the Camellia growing in the front of our house. These lovely, winter hardy plants — I should note that last night the temperature dipped to -5 C (23 F) — revealed their first blooms in late fall, and the blooming continues now, even in winter.
Thank you Bryant for the wake-up call! Clearly I’ve been lost in thought. As in Chattanooga, situated along the Tennessee River in the Appalachian Mountains, flowers are also scant this time of year in the North Carolina Piedmont; but the Camellia growing in our front yard, a native to southern Japan (where for centuries its leaves were used for tea and its nuts for tea seed oil for cooking and cosmetics), gave me a “Flower of the Day” — to behold its natural beauty, to photograph, and to contemplate. It was an unbidden gift of awareness in the moment, a wonder-filled, brief — yes, all-too-scant, instant in time.
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