The town where we live has just the best little farm and garden store. It's the kind of place we can take visitors from out of town and they'll gush about how “cute” the store is (and yes, it is pretty darned, uh, cute.)
The store sells hay and farm animal feed, work gloves and boots and straw gardeners’ hats. If I want to buy Leah a simple gift, the store has homemade soaps and candles (you know: cute stuff.)
The feed store is also a kind of gathering place, a resource where people here can go to learn most anything: Who in town is selling a dairy goat? Has anybody around here got firewood they want to get rid of? Who can we get to feed our animals while we’re out of town?
Leah and I went to the feed store last week to buy spring flowers. My job on the trip was to carry the shopping basket, but I occasionally lobbied for the purchase of plants I thought offered photographic potential. Some of the flowers we brought home went into the gardens, others into the baskets on an old bike Leah uses as a kind of decorative planter.
Not long ago I saw a commercial on television, an ad for a credit card available through Chase Bank. “Chase What Matters,” the ad voice-over was telling the viewer, while in the background, rock music by “Queen” was pounding, singing: “I want it all! I want it all! I want it now!” In the storyline of the ad, happiness was to be found in the purchase of a new television set. The TV, of course, can be had simply by choosing the right bank, by using the right credit card.
I look at the flowers Leah has planted.
I see. I know.
We already have what matters.
