Judy was wearing Estonian socks when I visited the other day, socks embroidered with flowers.

When we first moved to Estonia I wondered at the stitching that was everywhere. It was on everything from slippers to handkerchiefs and throw pillows… Little flowers, berries, vines and leaves, stalks of wheat, little growing things.

“Hmm, cute.” But wheat, berries, flowers, leaves… What did they mean to me?

But when you’ve found strawberries in the forest while camping in the summer, you know what berries are. They’re a surprise. And when you’ve seen cornflowers in a friend’s garden or brought home a summer bunch from the stalls at Freedom Square, you know what cornflowers are. They’re warmth and light and the simple colors of your country. And when you’ve wondered for weeks whether spring would really come, you know the relief from seeing the little green things begin to grow. They’re life after winter, and there’s hope again.

And the wheat… The wheat means food from the earth and bread for your bones when there have been times you’ve needed the strength it’s given.

Once things are something to you, even the very smallest of them matter a great deal. The ones that mean life, your life, you want to put everywhere.

On your slippers, your handkerchiefs, covering your pillows.

On your socks.

We miss something by not being connected to the world, the real world. It seems like beautiful things, like florals, for instance, are coming to merely mean “fashionable”, or “unfashionable”. But does that say much for us? And when we find our favorite color palettes in magazines or color wheels instead of sunrises on the sea or trees in a fog or anything else we’ve fallen in love with, are we settling for something?

I feel like we’re getting gradually more disconnected, from the world, from each other; and we’re finding fewer reasons to be grateful. So much is flat now, and smooth, and we’re becoming very comfortable with gray because it’s gray.

But how good when things are something. Different to you, to me, but full of meaning that grows when we share what we love with each other.

The flowers on Judy’s socks made me feel so many things.

It’s what the flowers are to me.