Last week was a week for new vocabulary words – thoracentesis, pneumo(thorax), pleurodesis – words I didn’t really want to learn! My father’s congestive heart failure had cause fluids to build up in the pleural cavity once again and we were set for a “thoracentesis” on Tuesday morning. This was the third time he had this procedure and it was being done on an outpatient basis. Some air got into the cavity in the procedure however, leading to hospitalization the next day and another procedure to remove the air, leaving him hooked up to a pleur-evac. And then the doctors decided they should do a “pleurodesis” to close up the cavity between the lung and the pleural wall hopefully keeping any fluid from building up in the future. That was done on Friday morning, my parents’ sixty-second anniversary. So I spent most of the week driving back and forth between Morristown (home and hospital) and Madison (work) taking my mom to visit my dad and waiting as the procedure were done. I was pretty self-absorbed and not taking much time to look around me.

Imagine my surprise when I set off on a bike ride early Saturday morning and discovered the vibrancy of the mid-summer landscape. In addition to the many cultivated flowers that are in bloom – including our own black-eyed Susans – the abundant blooms in the Great Swamp caught my attention. I love taking pictures of flowers, trying to capture the incredible palette of colors and the play of light. And so I reveled in turning my attention to these blooms.

As I rode along on my bike, I couldn’t help thinking that so often it is easy to ignore the blooms that are around us. Today’s gospel reading on the parable of the sower talks about seeds falling on different types of ground. So often my own preoccupation keeps me from even noticing the seeds, nevermind working to make the soil rich and well aerated so that seeds can bloom. When a co-worker comes into the office with a new idea, do I celebrate the bloom that could be or think of it as just more work? Our own worries and obsessions can work like blinders, keeping us from seeing the blooms around us.

As I reflect on the past week, I can see that even in the hospital I experienced blooms – the nurse practitioner who explained each step of the procedure carefully, the woman from the food service who really cared about whether my dad liked his meal, the clergy visitors, and many other doctors, nurses, and aides who took care of my dad.

But the best bloom this week was seeing the rich, deep love my parents have for each other as they sat in a hospital room on their 62^nd anniversary and reminisced about a long-ago anniversary (their 4^th) when they went out for both lunch and dinner just two days before my dad received his orders to go to Korea with the navy. Blooms like that are as bright as any of the beautiful flowers I saw  on my bike ride!