I got these flowers from the maintenance men.

Our neighbors across the street have (well, had) these huge, beautiful bushes in front of their house. I want to call them butterfly bushes but I’m not sure that is right. They are kind of like giant marigolds as high as your head and the flowers are a mass of tiny round multicolored petals in orange and red and yellow. With the sun full on it, the bush blazed like a pile of jewels. Almost every single day I saw a random stranger pass by and stop and admire the flowers, exclaim about them to their friends, take pictures on their phones, touch them, smell them (they had no fragrance.) Anyway, it was an amazing sight.

But yesterday the yard workers showed up with their weed whackers and hedge clippers and mutilated the poor bush as well as the hot pink bougainvillea next to it. Chop chop! And the glory of the bush was no more.

So I rushed out and collected these flowers off the ground before they could sweep them all away.

“I like flowers,” I panted to the maintenance man because that was all the Spanish I could remember in the heat of the moment.

Here he is in action: