Richmond Made Me Love My Dad Even More

I realized how much I love my dad when i stumbled across bleeding hearts in my neighborhood today.

All week I'd been planning to take a walk around my neighborhood to see all the beautiful spring flowers up close. I made time for that walk today.

Maybe it the cloudy sky or rain droplets making their way to the ground below, but Church Hill had never looked finer to me until today. The fresh rainwater on the houses, resembled the roads used in car ads, all watered down and glowing. Maybe it wasn't even how the neighborhood looked, but the smell of rain not yet a few hours old.

I felt like a tourist in my neighborhood as i fumbled my camera from arm to arm to get the photographs I wanted. It started with wisteria, perhaps my favorite flower of all time. They form purplish water droplet-like blossoms that flow in the shape of grapes. That's probably why I love them; they are the grapes of flowers. There were pansies, tulips, dogwood, more pansies, and those weeds with pea pod like seeds, which I used as magic beans when I would play Willow as a child.

I walked in circles taking in the architecture of the yards and the beauty of the day. Then I stumbled upon a yard filled with bleeding hearts. I thought almost immediately, I love my dad.

Who the hell knows what bleeding hearts are in the first place? My father.

From rides with him on our lawnmower under the plum and apple trees at my first home to spending countless $5 reward coupons at the hardware store's garden section, he taught me everything I know, mostly, how to identify any living plant.

My father is a quiet man, but even still, I can look out my window and see him everywhere reciting back to me each and every plant, most especially, the bleeding heart and the day I remembered one of the many reasons I love my dad so much.


the bleeding heart: named for obvious reasons.