Dead Flowers

I love flowers----all aspects of them----in the wild, grown for cutting. . . but deciding when to finally dump a vase of flowers seems so difficult for me. In part, it's because I find beauty even in their decomposition, their letting go of color, their shriveling petals----patterns of dropped ones forming colorfully textured shadows.

Those in the photograph are being staged for release to the compost pile (moving them away from where they were originally placed seems important; otherwise, as time passes, they become objects of art in themselves, important statements about ephemeral life [instead of the more obvious comment on my lackadaisical housekeeping]). These have made it to the preliminary phase, where I look at them again, drink in their more muted colors with my eyes, and finally take them outside.