It’s peony season, and peony season signals my annual pilgrimage(s) to the corner of Sussex and Brunswick where peonies bloom in abundance. Last year, I arrived too late, and the flowers were already splayed wide open, and some were even taking their last breaths. They’re just as beautiful in that state, but I do like to watch them transitioning from introvert to extrovert, and from fresh and perky to aged and listless. Which is why I visit several times over several days. Between June 1st and June 7th, my phone is filled with pictures of peonies. Beyond being beautiful, they’re also emblematic of the passage of time. As I scroll back, among the various shades of pink petals, I see fresh-out-of-the-kiln pots, my children’s toothless smiles, selfies, screenshots and outings to the lake that feel both like yesterday and a lifetime ago.

Possibility –– it’s one of my favourite words. Derived from the Latin, possibilis, “able to be done,” possibility walks hand-in-hand with hope, potential, and the idea that there is always room for something else to emerge, something different, unexpected and exciting. It’s how I feel about sunsets, sandcastles and Spring. It’s how I feel about white walls and lumps of raw clay. It’s how I feel when I come home from a holiday, or when two colours merge to create a new one. I have a ring –– my most treasured ring –– that is a small and brilliant diamond, secured within a bezel and surrounded by a moat of gold. The design is utterly simple, and while I love it as it is, I sometimes imagine tiny diamonds floating in the “moat”, or one day filling it with cerulean enamel. I love that the negative space around the stone leaves room for possibility. Much harder for any of us to accept is that alongside the beauty of possibility comes the terror of it. And that even though we know that possibility as a concept is free and fluid and unwritten, and that we have little to no control over its movement, we still shut ourselves off from the possibility of that which we fear. To embrace possibility is to embrace every facet of a multifaceted thing. Even the surfaces that the light does not touch. And hope that, “able to be done,” means that we will survive –– and maybe even thrive –– for having held it.

For the first time in years, the Irises in are our front garden are set to bloom. Buried under construction fencing, and deprived of regular watering, it’s a wonder they survived at all. And in the back garden, our once magnificent fringe tree, now in recovery after a transplant, produced its first thin petaled, white flowers this week. Nature’s resilience never seizes to amaze me, and always makes me feel hopeful. I read an essay today on one woman’s passion for bringing unhealthy plants back to life. “The good news is that the solution to a plant problem is rarely complicated –– often the smallest adjustment can make the biggest change.” Human problems are more complicated, although the same applies; one small adjustment leads to another, and then another, and so on. Before we know it, we’re blooming again. I found this photograph of a baby Luma and I in the wisteria and white fringe of our old garden today. With so much change to our home over the last few years, it’s wonderfully reassuring to see that some things are as they were.