Sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers and have always been. I had fallen in love with the sunflower during one of our many, many road trips from Paris down to Bordeaux when I was little. The scenery from the car window was meadow upon meadow of sunflowers for as far as the eye could see and I have always associated the sunflower with the feeling of anticipation of seeing my family in Bordeaux after a long year of separation.
During the summer trip that our daughter and I took in 2012, we were driven down to Bordeaux from Rouen with our cousins Francoise and Nicolas and I was so excited to show our daughter the magnificent fields of sunflowers. She was as impressed as I had been when I first saw them all those years ago. The pictures that I had taken from the back of Nicolas’s car doesn’t do the flower the justice it deserves, so I found some other images to show how cheerful, beautiful and uplifting these flowers truly are.
The reason why I am writing about sunflowers is because last night my husband and I went out to a restaurant with a very lovely colleague that my husband has just started working with on a new project. The restaurant that was chosen for our dinner is called the Sunflower Vegetarian restaurant close by in Vienna Virginia.
I always get nervous upon meeting new people; I don’t know why, it isn’t as if I have ever had a bad experience before, but I get the butterflies in my stomach and I worry if I am going to talk too much or not enough or I won’t have anything to contribute to the conversation. Well last night I had nothing to worry about because Abby, that is her name, was so easy to talk to, very open and so very interesting. The conversation never fell into a lull, I had a really good time. So much so that I didn’t even pay attention to what we were eating; the conversation was that lively and interesting. My husband took care of the ordering and I took a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it all tasted good and I was satiated at the end. I was having too much fun with the table conversation.
I can never take really warm, welcoming and friendly people for granted. Anytime that I have the chance to spend time and converse with them is a plus in my life. We truly are social creatures.
laurieanichols 