Bougainvillea Blessings

Sometimes G-d seems to be sending us messages — even those of us who don’t really “believe” in “God”. I got up from my seat just now and saw that two bougainvillea bracts had blown in through the french doors onto my tiled living room floor. “Where did these come from?” I asked myself — although it’s really no big question, as bougainvillea is one of the most common plantings here. I know the people on the top floor of my apartment building have a bougainvillea – when I look up from my mirpeset it’s hot pink bracts flare against the intense blue of the sky.

But in asking, I received another answer. Tomorrow, September 29th, is Bob’s and my 28th wedding anniversary. At our wedding, my sister and a family friend scattered dried bougainvillea blossoms which they had collected from the friend’s greenhouse, in place of the traditional confetti. I can see in my mind’s eye the pictures my husband’s son and daughter-in-law took — my smiling sister in her banana-yellow jacket upending the basket of cerise flowers over Bob in his tweed jacket and me in my Prussian blue dress with the metallic gold dots. I can’t share those pictures, which are not digitalized, but here (above and below) is bougainvillea I took a few days ago.

Bob and I used to go out to dinner at T.J. Buckley’s for our anniversary — in the “old days” we paid for our meal with organic shallots we’d grown ourselves. (Here’s the link, for those of you who may have missed the pleasure: https://tjbuckleysuptowndining.com/) In years like this one, when Rosh HaShanah and our anniversary coincided, we’d move the dinner to another night. When I’m sitting in services tomorrow night (not leading anything at all, for the first time in well over a decade), I may be thinking of Bob, and of Michael Fuller’s delicious and beautiful (and entirely treyf) pate plate. We didn’t make it out of the house on our very last anniversary, but the year before that, even with Bob in his diminished condition, we did. In my heart I’m there with him again, or even further back, standing under that shower of bougainvillea on a crisp September day, newly married, newly settled in our little house, and feeling as if all my life’s wishes had been answered.