Of course, the outdoors is everywhere outside the boxes we have built for ourselves, fortunately, with windows. Yesterday I went shopping — yes! But for flowers and flower pots. I bought tulips that do so well indoors, a muscari, that beautiful bulb that makes tiny blue flowers like bells, and a large yellow cymbidium orchid, all of which I potted and put indoors where Payson can enjoy them — he loves flowers and his birthday month is coming up. I made two tiny terrarium type pots with succulents and put them on the window sill in my study. Payson tells me today that he read somewhere that having plants indoors increases one’s productivity. How can they not add to one’s joy, too, these growing, flowering, carbon dioxide guzzling, oxygen producing live things?

Plants, dear friends, are our allies on this journey. Befriend them!