It was only brief.
I just missed the green arrow at traffic lights. I was running very late, and here I was waiting for some smoke-spluttering Korean van to putt-putt its way across the intersection.
So I took a deep breath and looked up.
And there it was.
A few years back I used to work in a vet clinic in a daggy rural town. It used to be the old meatworks building, and so was on the opposite side of the tracks to the main drag. Every lunchtime (and I use the term very loosely, it was usually 10 minutes snuck in between surgeries) when it was my turn to buy food, I'd pop out of the front door and go through the level crossing to the hamburger shop to get however many chicken caesar salads as there were nurses rostered on. On the way to the shop, just before you had to cross the main street, there was a run-down cottage. It had a white picket fence with the odd picket broken in half and paint peeling off the edges of most others, and a lawn of dry spindly grass like you would find on the back oval of a school. Up against the fence there were 5 rather straggly looking rose bushes that looked in desperate need of a good hair cut and something to drink.
I never stopped there.
I never even looked.
This one day though, I came out of the front door of the clinic after a particularly bad morning, and there was a little butterfly madly flitting about in front of me, all the way from the tree that hung over the side fence of the clinic and as I went through the level crossing gates. It was so irratic that I started grinning and asking it questions and following it's path with a little jump in my step. It landed on a rose in the front of the beat-up old cottage. It wasn't much of a rose mind you, it looked little more than a scarlet dishmop on a very underproportioned handle, but there it was, poking itself through the pickets and resting on the rail.
I smelled the rose.
Cliched I know, but it just seemed fitting. As a rule, I find roses fairly ordinary, and a much to ugly and prickly way to produce a pretty flower, but if this one didn't just fill my head with the most gorgeous mellow honey scent. One flower, that was all it managed that year, but geez what a stunner it was. The stalk was weak, and the bush itself scarcely had a bit of green on it, but that flower, it had every right to be proud as punch.
I looked around for he butterfly, but it had danced on it's merry way. I don't know what made me do it, and I'm not sure what it making me admit it now, but I looked at that rose bush and said thanks. It probably made little difference to the rose bush, but it just seemed right. A very cliched end to the utterly storybook scenario.
I sometimes forget about that rose, and the days that month where I would stop on my way to buy lunch and compliment it on its petals, or pour a cup of water on it's dry roots. It would always make me smile. Even when the petals fell to the ground and all that was left was a crumbly little nub, I still smiled and said hello.
Today, while I was sitting at the traffic lights willing them to turn green, it all came flooding back to me. It had been a lousy morning and I was not expecting much better from the rest of the day, but then something caught my eye. I thought it was one of those pressed polystyrene glider planes that a child had thrown out of a nearby townhouse window, but on it's second pass I recognised it to be a little honey-eater. Sitting right across from a filthy dirty intersection, and stuck between soundproof barriers and tall boring townhouses, it was frolicking. It did two passes, a double somersault, swooped down and shook the tips of the bush, and swung back around to hang under a large yellow grevillea bloom that was easily twice it's size.
It was ever so brief, but my heart just sang. A moment or two, and memories of that one single rose just rushed back. I could almost smell it. How long had it been since I'd stopped to smell a rose? When was the last time I danced barefoot in the rain with the grass squelshing between my toes? Had it really been that long since I'd sat in the back garden at school lunchtime and listened to them play?
When did I stop looking for the small joys in life that used to make me so happy?
I don't really know, but it ends now. One small joy a day cannot be that hard to find.
Today, it was a happy bird hanging upside down on a flower.
