A Tale of Some Lilies

First off, aren’t these lilies gorgeous? Yes. My Jon got some for me on our anniversary. We had these kind of lilies at our wedding — but we almost didn’t. That’s where the tale comes in.

Fifteen years ago, Alabama was finishing up one of the driest summers it had experienced in many years. We had almost no rain. That meant that my father’s garden, the garden that had supplied many a party with blooms, didn’t have much to offer me, the gardener’s daughter.

When we placed the order for the flowers for the ceremony we decided to go really simple and mainly have one flower. I love lilies and so we decided on the Casablanca. Our florist ordered a bunch of them from somewhere in South America and we thought that was the end of the story. But, it wasn’t.

You see, dry summers don’t last. After a while, some rain is bound to come. So, rain it did. In fact, it wasn’t just rain, but bands of the hurricane, Erin, that struck the Gulf Coast just prior to my weekend wedding. We were busy thinking about logistics for the wedding and having the reception in the middle of a deluge, meanwhile, our florist was hoping that the lilies would make it to the airport.

They did make it. But it took a middle-of-the-night driving trip and quite a bit of airport searching to finally locate the shipment.

We hoped that the flowers would still look okay. But, you know, we knew that they might not look great given what the poor things had been through.

Guess what? They were absolutely gorgeous and didn’t look or smell like flowers that had been through heck and high water to make it to the destination.

Sometimes poor planning works out, anyway. Thank goodness for that, since poor planning seems to be a permanent feature of yours truly.

Have a good weekend, y’all!