Make the World More Beautiful, Lupine Lady!

In Canada, we are celebrating our first official long weekend with warm weather. I am sure many of us wondered if winter had become a year round season. This is the weekend when many people venture out to the lakes to go camping while others hit the greenhouses to make their yards bloom. This year I am of the latter group.

We started the weekend off with a family BBQ celebrating my nieces birthdays. When Saturday hit, new beginnings came to the Kasowski household. We gutted out our garage and my husband finally purged some of those University textbooks he had been holding onto. He keeps thinking someday he might need them - they're outdated. I reminded him he has not looked at them in the past 15-20 years. I had some purging of mine own to do as well. Decluttering can be very cleansing. It makes space for great things to come into our lives.

Decluttering is an art. My colleague, Sherry Borsheim of Simply Productive, says it is important to stay in one room until you are completely finished. Don't worry about taking things to where they belong until the end of the day. If you leave, you are likely to get distracted by all the other things you need to do. Focus is the key. Quick decision-making is also essential. Does this item bring mevalue right now? Have I used it in the past year? Everything has its place.

While he worked on painting the garage floor and re-organizing the garage, I ventured out to Home Depot, Wal-mart, and Canadian Tire in search of some bedding plants and perennials. I really wanted to find lupines; the aphids killed mine the past couple years. I have been inspired to plant lupines ever since I read the children's book, "Miss Rumphius" by Barbara Cooney. In this story, the grandfather tells his granddaughter of all of his adventures and his granddaughter exclaims, "I, too, will go to faraway places, and when I grow old, I too will live beside the sea." Her grandfather said, "That is all very well, little Alice, but there is a third thing you must do. Alice wondered and asked what that could be. Her grandfather tells her, "You must do something to make the world more beautiful."  Throughout the story, you will learn of Alice's grand adventures and how she makes the world more beautiful. She becomes known as the Lupine Lady. I do not want to spoil a great book. I highly recommend you read it some time. I did end up finding only two lupines. I plant them in my flower garden to remind my family and I that we must make the world more beautiful.

As the weekend continues, my husband and son have now gone to the golf course for a well-deserved break. I am sipping ice tea with the breeze gently blowing through the window as I spend this afternoon writing. There are still some odds and ends to go through in the the garage but the garage looks amazing. My flowers were planted just in time as the rain drops began to fall - making the world around me more beautiful.

How do you make the world more beautiful? Do you have a symbolic reminder?