The freesias uncovered a childhood memory.
The first year the freesias bloomed from the bulbs that I planted deep in the ground, I was really happy to see them gracing my garden.
The years pass; every spring the flowers bring beauty and its light, delicate scent, almost like baby powder.
Then one day when I looked at the freesias, a memory from long ago came to my mind.
I remember when I was a very young girl, a page of a nursery rhyme book made a big impact on me.
It was a picture of Little Miss Muffet. She was in her garden, and the detail in the illustration that really captured me was the colorful flowers drawn with little feminine faces.
The freesias took me on that long journey back, to that piece of art that had so captivated me. I saw that little flower faces again, with their big, twinkling eyes and petals for hats.
Maybe, the freesias reminded me of the shape of the flowers; or maybe it is one of the mysterious ways that the mind recollects.
And it made me think: in a wooden house in the tropics, a little girl sees a picture of English flowers. But in the imagination of a child, unsullied by limitations, her mind is free to travel wherever it wants to go.
And that power of the imagination, ideally, should never go away.
