Reminded and Inspired

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Our memories can be very precious to us, and when someone reminds us of something sweet from our past it can be very inspiring. @Corbin5 had a flower mystery. She had lost the name tag for her flowers. Deborah shared a picture of a lovely pink flower with glossy green leaves that she has planted in her garden. It is a Periwinkle variety. No, I do not mean the sea shell, but a very hardy flower. The memory she gave back to me is this: My entire family loves plants. I grew up seeing my mom and her mom trade flower cuttings and starts every time we visited. It was very much one of our social activities with one another. The very first time my grandmother let me take home a plant, it was a periwinkle. The original plants (vinca minor) and their vining cousins (vinca major) only came in one heavenly blue color at that time, sometimes they had a pink or red eye, but I could not find an image of that. The Crayola company pays tribute to the color with their periwinkle blue color crayon. So I dug up my periwinkle, wrapped the roots in wet paper, then crumpled up foil around it. We had a four hour drive home. As I remember, my flower friend survived and spread. Periwinkles ushered me in to the secret sisterhood within my family. We grew things and knew their names and shared back and forth. I was a "big girl" at seven years old and felt very included. This also laid the foundation for growing many other plants, and unknowingly learning some life sciences at the same time. It was inclusion, beauty and education all wrapped up together. This is a free image of a periwinkle from Pixabay. As I mentioned to @Corbin5 in her discussion "Wish I knew your name" I saw displays of these in all colors from pure white to a deep indigo blue this year. One Walmart had a "red, white, and blue" rack of only Vincas.