Earlier this spring, while running I passed through a wooded area and I remembered mountain laurel.  When we lived in Cherry Valley the woods behind the house were full of mountain laurel.  Every morning, I walked Gert the dog and marveled at the white and pink blossoms.  How long had it been since I had seen mountain laurel?

So I started to look for it.  We had a slow, cold spring so it seemed everything bloomed late and at once – lilacs, azaleas, and oodles of flowering trees.  On a road trip to Baltimore we saw white blossoms on the highways in Connecticut and stopped for gas where I rushed to the edge of the parking lot to check.  Not mountain laurel.

A friend told me that mountain laurel is old-fashioned, you rarely find it sold at nurseries.  So I stopped looking.  Spring would soon turn to summer, anyway.

Then, while running on the same street I walk and run almost every day – there was blooming mountain laurel.  I stopped, sniffed, admired, marveled.  And of course after that one bush, I saw mountain laurel everywhere.  Here are pink blooms across my street.

Perhaps you can tell that I am not much of a gardner.  A more skillful landscaper would know when laurel is in season.  But in my botanic ignorance I was searching without finding and then finding with a wonder and marvel at God’s grace.  The revealing of blooms was out of my control. I experienced the flowering as grace.