Sometimes Tiny Yellow Wildflowers is Exactly What You Need

Photo by Alysa Bajenaru on Unsplash

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately. After more than a year spent within a very tight radius of our home, we began to venture out more about the time school started. Most of our time on the road is spent driving to and from my 7-year-old’s soccer practices. He joined a new soccer program this year and there are three practices per week a significant distance from home. I have no idea why I signed him up for it. I guess we can chalk it up to pandemic panic.

Like, I assume I was thinking that we did nothing for more than a year, so we really needed to do something now. Even if that something is pseudo-serious soccer for 7-year-olds, several of whom spend a significant amount of time doing bad cartwheels on the field.

On one of our afternoon drives, as we headed north on a mostly non-descript highway that circles the greater Orlando area, we crossed a long, flat bridge that traverses a large, alligator-filled lake. I’m sure we were all ornery, tired, and generally fed up with everything as we tend to be on these drives that come at pretty much the worst possible time — 4:30 in the afternoon after long days of school.

This drive turned out to be a little different than all the others because, in the swampy areas at the edge of the big lake, huge swaths of small yellow flowers had appeared. What had been typical, boring swampland the last time we drove past a couple of days before, was now illuminated with splendid yellow. It took one glance at those wildflowers for me to travel about two decades into the past.

When I was in college, I used to drive on a slightly different highway from my parents’ house to school several days a week. Much like the highway my children and I drive now, this highway crossed a swampy area — it was still central Florida, after all. Every fall, shortly after classes started up for the year, those yellow wildflowers would surprise me one day. They would disrupt the monotony of my lonely drives.

And for whatever reason, those flowers made me a little happier. I appreciated their consistency, reliability, and beauty. I remembered wanting to share them with my mom because I knew she would love them, too. She wasn’t with me on my drives then because I was in college and bringing your mom to class was probably frowned upon or whatever. So, since I didn’t have a telephone with a camera on it at the time, I had to take a mental picture of those flowers and save them for when I needed a little boost.

I’m not going to get into details about what all has been going on the past couple of months because, even though I am pretty transparent on the internet and social media, I do value my children’s privacy. Particularly when it comes to certain topics. So, I’ll just leave it at this. Pandemic school is hard. Starting kindergarten cold turkey with no preschool preparation is hard. And all of it is even harder when additional stressors and health concerns are added into the mix.

We all needed to see those flowers. All four of us in that car. And I was glad to have three of my favorite people with me to experience a little sliver of beauty. Hopefully, it provided them a small spark of joy like it did a lonely boy twenty years ago. Maybe even a big enough spark to make driving 25 minutes to yet another soccer practice bearable.

We can dream.

Andrew is a writer of essays and humor and an editor of Frazzled, a parenting humor publication on Medium. You can subscribe to his email list for updates and follow him on Twitter for terrible tweets and more wildflower content, probably.