Geraniums

While reading another book, I came across this quote from Innocent Blood, by P.D. James, and remembered a winter day a few years ago when I took delight in the geraniums on my windowsill, with the help of my camera.

She fixed her eyes on the geranium on the windowsill. Why had she never before realized how beautiful it was? She had seen geraniums as the gaudy expedient of municipal gardeners to be planted in park beds, massed on political platforms, a useful pot plant for the house, since it throve with so little attention. But this plant was a miracle of beauty. Each flowerlet was curled like a miniature rosebud on the end of its furred, tender stem. Imperceptibly but inevitably as her own breathing they were opening to the light. The petals were a clear, transparent pink, faintly stripped with yellow, and the fanlike leaves, how intricately veined they were, how varied in their greenness, each with its darker penumbra. Some words of William Blake fell into her mind, familiar but new. "Everything that lives is holy. Life delights in life." . . . Everything living was part of one great wholeness. To breathe was to take in delight.