The hands that protect the treasure within

I see the same familiar flower everyday yet I really didn’t know much about it until I took a very close look.

There’s a hedge of jasmine that grows just outside our bedroom window. The flowers are so small, no more than an inch from the tip of one petal to the tip of the petal opposite it, that they really don’t make much of an impression unless one sees the flowers in clusters. I was cooking lunch earlier, waiting for one side of my fish and chives frittata to brown so I could flip it over to brown the other side, when I got restless. Sometimes, twelve minutes — the time it takes for one side of the frittata to brown — can be so infernally long especially when the noonday heat is upon you. I pushed the curtains to allow more breeze in and noticed that the jasmine hedge was now several inches above the base of the window. So, I had this idea… I got the camera, pushed the lens to within an inch of one of the jasmine flowers and took several shots, competing with the breeze that made the flower sway so it was difficult to get a sharp shot. I managed one out of about a dozen.

The surprise came after downloading the photos to my computer. I never noticed it before but the spiky things that oh, so gracefully curve around the yellow center…?? They look like outstretched hands protecting that golden yellow thing. From what? I don’t know. Maybe, even from me.