Today was another quiet day at my parent’s place. I helped my dad fix one of his sprinkler heads. His sprinkler system has heads that sit just above his rhododendrons. Those rhododendrons are taller than I am, which means this particular sprinkler was that tall. While all the azaleas and rhododendrons are green and growing they’re well past the blooming season. If I want to see them in bloom I need to come back and visit next spring.

I also spent a little time with my dad walking through the greenhouse. It’s good to see it still in operation, but it’s nothing like the “glory days” of ten, and even five, years ago. There was a very bad freeze one winter and the thermostat in the greenhouse failed to activate the heater in time. When my dad woke up early the next morning, a lot of the orchids had already been frozen out. All that invaluable time invested in those orchids was wiped out. Since he’d was already retired he couldn’t afford to just buy and replace.

Even though he still has far more orchids than I have (and will ever have), at the height of his orchid collection both walls would be covered with sitting and hanging orchids, many in bloom. They’d cover both walls as well as hanging down the center. By comparision I have six, down from a dozen I had five years ago. One of them is an orchid he gave me that I haven’t managed to kill yet.

The best I can say is I have the memories of those times, and he has a lot of Kodachrome slides of his orchids. There is a record, living and fixed.