Baseball and Flowers

Every so often, a photo comes along that stands out above the rest and stirs something deep in your chest.

This is that photo for me.

Baseball and flowers.

Baseball roots run deep in our family. For many years, it wasn’t just a sport — it was a way of life in our household. 

As a teenager, my husband was a promising pitcher who earned a full scholarship to play ball at a nearby university. The Braves had even shown interest and placed him on their watch list. But life had other plans. He grew up very poor, and even with tuition covered, he still needed money for food, gas, and to help his mother pay bills. After a few years, he stepped away from the game to work full time. He was never bitter. He trusted the Lord had another path for him. But the love of the game never left — it simply shifted into years of men’s league softball and coaching his children in rec ball and little league.

Our son inherited that same love.

He learned to pitch young. He played everywhere, but the mound was home. He played college ball, too — until injuries began to stack up. A shoulder injury. A hip injury. Another hip injury. Eventually, the door closed before it ever fully opened. Losing something to circumstance is one thing. Losing it to your own body is another. He handled it with quiet strength, but it was an emotional loss all the same.

The love of the game, though? Still there.

He now serves as the assistant baseball coach at our local high school. And he’s engaged to the sweetest girl — a girl he absolutely adores.

Which brings me to the photo.

His fiancée works at the university he recently graduated from. This past Valentine’s Day, she was working. His team’s first game of the season happened to be in the same town — about an hour from home.

So, in true dramatic fashion, he convinced the school bus driver to make a quick stop on campus so he could deliver the flowers his mom grew to the second love of his life. (I am obviously the first.)

What bus driver could say no?

So the bright yellow school bus rolled past the guard shack, through campus, and stopped at the gym. He ran in with flowers in hand. No photos were taken, sadly — but he said when he came back out, the entire team had their heads out the bus windows cheering.

The best kind of spectacle.

The best kind of memory.

This photo may never grace the cover of a magazine. But it holds so many things I love in one frame:

Baseball.
Flowers.
And a boy who loves a girl.

And if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s this — sometimes the dreams don’t unfold the way we expect… but they still bloom beautifully.