Answered prayer…

This was sometime ago when we got wind of the news that my girl had been successful in her application for a transfer from her school in the jungle to one right here in town. Because of that, we decided to offer some flowers at the church that we frequent as a gesture of thanksgiving that our prayers at the weekly novena on Saturdays had been answered.

That was why I dropped by the florist I usually went to and I asked for five white lilies to signify the five decades of the Holy Rosary and ten red roses for the ten Hail Mary’s in each decade. What I did not know was that to her (the florist), five lilies meant five stalks and actually, on each stalk, there would be three or more lilies. In the end, I just let her do as she liked though I was not all that pleased with the end result…

…and furthermore, the newly-arrived lilies had not bloomed yet. When I got home, I added some wild non-edible ferns from my garden and I felt that it looked a little better after that. That was on Ascension Thursday and by Saturday, a few days later, all the lilies had fully bloomed…

…and yes, in my opinion, it did look much nicer after that.

Talking about those ferns, they sprout out of nowhere, here, there and everywhere, all along the fence at the back of my garden. This…

…is a different variety that I do not quite like so I would just pull them out and throw away whenever I do the weeding.

I prefer this one…

– the leaves have a nicer pattern so they look more attractive…or to me, at least. When I spot any, I would pull them out by the roots and transplant them in my pot of ferns…

…and they do seem to grow pretty well there.

There was another variety, the creeping kind that actually looked very nice, dangling from the pot but I hated how the tendrils would reach out to the neighbouring plants and start strangling them. In the end, I had no choice – I pulled them all out and threw them away.