Blue Bowl

Once, on a rain-spitting afternoon in January, I sat in St. John-at-Hampstead, England, and felt as if I were inside a Wedgwood bowl or vase. Crisp white moldings -- ribbed and carved -- delineated soft walls of peachy ecru and blue, lines and curves, roundels and arches, all combined into the softness of a spring day with leaves newly green. Outside, I found the graveyard somber, sodden, but inside the building sang.

Every so often, for reasons I don't fully understand, I remember that church where I sat just once, and I return in my mind's eye to that space of calm and beauty. 

Today, that happened when I saw this Lady's Slipper, barely blushing pink, in the woods at Lake Cheston.

And I thought of that St. John again later when I looked up through the last of the pink dogwood blooms into the blue bowl of sky.

At times like these, I am happy.