08/28/2026
The Volunteer 🌺
I did not plant her.
She simply appeared among the yellow flowers, bright red and beautiful, as if she had decided this little corner of my garden would do just fine.
A Texas Star hibiscus, they tell me.
A volunteer.
I love that word.
A little seed that somehow found its way here. Maybe the wind brought her. Maybe a bird. Who knows? She landed in this little piece of earth, took root and stayed.
I know something about that.
Once, I was a girl on a little island in the Caribbean. And somehow life carried me all the way here, to Wake Forest, North Carolina, standing in my garden looking at a flower I never planted.
For most of my life, I wondered where I belonged.
Maybe it happens when you leave the place where your story began. You start looking for home in places, in people, in being accepted.
At least I did.
It took me a long time to understand that you must belong to yourself first.
You plant your own roots.
You make a home within yourself.
And then, wherever life carries you, you can bloom.
Because wherever you find yourself… there you are.
And lately I wonder if home is even a place.
Maybe home is this heart and the soul connected to it. Maybe this life, which feels so enormous while we are living it, is really just a little glimpse, a minute in time.
And maybe we are not so different from this little volunteer.
We arrive somewhere. We make a life. We love. We lose. We grow. And hopefully, somewhere along the way, we bloom.
And when our time in this garden is finished, maybe we find another garden and make ourselves at home again.
I don’t know.
But I like thinking about it.
So I’m leaving her exactly where she chose to grow. 🌺
She found some earth.
She took root.
She bloomed.
And maybe that’s what she came to remind me:
Belonging is not the place.
It’s the journey.
From a little island in the Caribbean to this little garden in Wake Forest…
Here I am.
And wherever I go from here,
there I’ll be. 🌺❤️🌳