…“The nicest thing about the promise of spring is that sooner or later, she’ll have to keep it.” That’s what I write in a card to my old pal Kathleen every year about this time, between our birthdays – well, every year I remember, but it’s the majority of the past near-thirty.

I don’t even know how our tradition got started. (It’s a quote we picked up somewhere.) But since I live in the South, it’s a promise that’s kept to me before Kathleen, who’s lived in Iowa ever since we met there in college, so I figure she can use the sentiment. I heard Iowa had snow last week!

Over here in North Carolina, this first week of spring, I’ve got daffodils, Lenten roses (below), forsythia, redbud, and flowering trees galore. But it’s my psychology, rather than my weather, that’s really ready to “break into blossom,” as another line of poetry stuck in my head goes.

Who isn’t cheered by a bright bouquet? I always imagine farm tables set with little jelly-jar vases of wildflowers plucked from the surrounding countryside. Lacking a countryside around my suburban house – or even a proper cutting garden – I’ve been known to crouch in the lawn to clip tiny sheaves of violets, or reach up into the branches to clip a few stems of dogwood or rhododendron, just to get that sweet charge a bunch of blossoms brings.

Then the other day, a friend brought me a bunch of carrots from the market that made me swoon as if they were roses — or even my favorite, peonies. Seriously! These weren’t just any carrots: They were a rainbow of carrots, from deepest ruby red to creamy yellow, with every shade of orange in between. They had in their favor the surprise factor (I’d never seen such carrots!) and the fact that they happened to be variations on my favorite color. Their flourish of leafy greens didn’t hurt, either. Those carrots plumb made me happy.

And those carrots got me thinking… what would happen if I opened my eyes and heart to other unexpected “bouquets” that might be waiting to be stumbled on in a given day?