16x20 oil on canvas 
 
    “I glimpse proof of a loving God, in non-essential flowers flung across a hill to please a happy child”. - Suzanne Randles
 
    This is a line from a poem my mother wrote over fifty years ago. It is such a picture of how she saw the world around her. Others may have seen wildflowers growing haphazardly in a field - she saw the plan of an all wise and all loving God, who cares about the very least of these. Where others saw the surface, she saw deeper.
 
    It was in my Mother’s garden that she challenged all her children to see the world in a deeper way. Summer nights for our family were often spent in the garden, reading aloud poetry and other classic works of literature. I was too young to understand it all, but it was there I learned to love words, and seek deeper meanings. In the cool of the evening, as the shadows grew and the lovely smell of phlox filled the air, we prayed the Lord’s Prayer together, and I learned that God was real and important. I first learned to love music, listening to the voices of my parents, singing German love songs in the stillness of the garden.
   
     I think my love of color began as a child, my mother holding up a flower and asking what colors I saw. She encouraged me to not just see pink, or purple. But taught me that there are a dozen shades of a dozen colors in most things, if you look deeper.
 
     Many years later, I am older and that garden is no more. But the older I get, the more I realize that my roots grew deep in my mother’s garden.