Sheila's cotton

A beautiful thing arrived today.

Sheila lives in Memphis and blogs at Folk, Flocks and Flowers.  She loves... well, she just loves, but all sorts of things, music and words and birds and flowers and Italy, (she lived there for years and speaks fluent Italian, can even give lectures in it); she loves her friends and her family and Drazen her husband (who's Croatian, she speaks Croatian too) and her dogs who have the fabulous names of Pablo and Tosca.  She is beautiful and talented and courageous and rich in faith and hope and love  One day she'll come and live in Europe, in Croatia, and then she'll be just sort of down the road, and we are going to sit in the sunset together when we are old ladies..  She's been a has been a faithful blog friend to me for years now, and we e-mail and sometimes snail-mail.

So quite out of the blue, though the elegant italic script on the envelope looked instantly familiar, a big jiffy bag arrived this morning.  Inside was another envelope with my initials exquisitely cut-out and stuck on it, a card and a letter, and another box which had once contained cranberry and orange biscotti, and inside that were...

cotton bolls!

Where Sheila lives they grow cotton, of course.  One day they were driving past a big field of it and she thought how lovely it looked, and surmised quite rightly that I would not be familiar with the sight of a field of cotton in its glory, and decided that she'd rather like to share something of the experience with me, so she got Drazen to stop, jumped down, turned around and picked a boll of cotton (or two), and sent it to me.

I just think this is magical, just to think to pick up, without harm or damage to anything, a little, simple piece of the world around you and share it with someone thousands of miles away to whom it is new and unfamiliar.  We all ought to do things like that more often.  Bless you, Sheila, as I'm blessed to have such people in my life.