kindness

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight.  Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward.  Your life will never be the same again. 

Og Mandino

The sun is out today; it has broken through the gloom and cold and is scattered throughout my house and it is very welcomed. I have enjoyed these few winter days of being held inside, too cold to spend more than a moment outside watching through the kitchen window, but I think a day of sunshine will be especially nice. This morning I am thinking of my 20^th birthday, surely propelled by the stillness of the season and my house at this moment. I am there because I am thinking about my dear friend that I spent that birthday with and I am thinking of her because she lives in New York and I always think of her when this extreme winter weather barrels in on her state. These little beads of memory lead me to a painting, a painting I did that long ago of “birthday flowers”. My friend and I were art students in Nice, France in 1974 and on June 29, I turned 20, but no one knew it was my birthday except her. We had NO money but she showed up with a random bouquet of delicate birthday flowers she had bought at the French Market and I did a small painting of them; it still hangs on my wall. I have had 56 birthdays and certainly do not remember most of them, but this is one I am remembering on this cold February day. It is the act of kindness that I still hold dear and although I seldom see my old friend, she is there in my little painting and is there in how I see the world; she was sunshine.

A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses. 
Chinese Proverb
b u

p s