Guess what I learned?

That if you hit the enter key twice in rapid succession, your blog message will get posted without previewing or before completion!

So now I'll write about the Christmas decorations that were in the last blog title. I learned something today. Not a big thing, but always interesting that as my awareness grows, I actually am more aware of things.

I love Christmas. I especially love the fresh greens of cedar, pine, and holly that grow so abundantly around South Carolina and that I have loved collecting for Christmas decorations since moving here. When I first moved here but in another part of the state, we formed a group that made and put up swags on all our street signs in the neighborhood, and it always looked beautiful. I missed that after moving away, so I started making swags for my street in this new community. The garden club decorates for Christmas, and over the years, I've helped them put up decorations.

Seems that they put these decorations up earlier and earlier each year. The fresh greens have a hard time looking fresh while in the bright sun when up for over a month. The garden club decided that artificial greens would solve that problem, and gradually have changed almost entirely from fresh to artificial. So we met today to sort through the huge assortment or swags, wreaths, bows, testing lights, straigthening or making new bows determining what decorations go where, all in preparation for members to put everything in place tomorrow.

Last year I had agreed to chair the Christmas decorating project but with all of challenges and life events that happened, I ended up not even being in town, so I was glad that I could help again this year. One of the projects will be that I make the large wreaths for the front doors of the club house, using an artificial base but adding fragrant fresh greens mixed in. So of course, I am delighted to be working with fresh greens again. And I love the excuse for collecting the greens. I love their fragrances. I love the beautiful shades of greens of different kinds of cedars, the shiny greens of the magnolias with their brown backsides, and the silvery greens of the eleagnus stems.

Today was a drizzly, cold, rainy day. I knew that I could have put off my greens collecting in hopes of better weather tomorrow, but instead I donned my waterproof poncho and headed out with clippers in hand. And that's when I learned something today. I learned that I'm one of those strange people that loves the fragrance of the woods in the rain. I learned how I love the smells that transport me to times past in an instant. I learned that I loved my time in the woods by myself as I collected greens. IAnd I learned that I enjoyed that time more than I did the time spent working indoors with friends. I learned to pay attention to how I was feeling as I listened to others talk. I learned to pay attention more to the quietness within. And I learned that I still love working with fresh greens, but in a whole new way than ever before. I learned that I felt more at one with nature more than ever before.