Have you ever been hiking and stepped on a sticker? 

Yesterday, Little Bit, my sweet niece, and I were hiking around the hills on our grandparent’s Iowa farm. We were laughing, talking, and enjoying our walk. My niece has an eye for noticing the plants of the winter pasture. 

I can tell you right now, I love that! That girl is after my own heart, as they say. Most of my plant identification books are dog-eared and marked up with all my plant and wildflower sightings.  

First, she pointed out some little orange “tomatoes”. Then, she saw some berries that were clustered and the deepest red, and she wondered if they were raspberries. 

Our walk continued and she came to a sudden stop right in front of the most unruly of weeds. The stickers were beyond awful. Obviously, that plant had some crazy self defense system going on. It was so “stickery”, that it’d be easy to feel bad for anything that ever stepped on it. 

As we walked away, she stopped me in my tracks by a completely sweet and innocent, yet profound observation:

“I bet if we were flowers and it (that sticker plant) could talk, it’d be meeeeaaaaaaan!” 

Exactly! Love that SO much! Not only her worldly knowledge about nice vs mean, but her beautiful thinking of open-hearted and unlimited possibilities. 

Yes, indeed! Sign me up! Ohhh! I’d love to be a flower! But, the choice would be so hard! Would I be a rose? A lilac? Perhaps a zinnia. Oh wait, a sunflower would be fun. 

She, on the other hand, would be an entire bouquet, so big it wouldn’t fit in your hands. She’d fill ten acres and radiate her colors all in one breath. The pinks, scarlett reds, and yellows would whisper her name. 

Wouldn’t that be something? We could sing in flowers, laugh in flowers, bask in the sun, and dance in the breeze, if only we were flowers.