Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Twice per year my wife and I escort her grandmother to one of two special events at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Each November we visit the Indiana Christmas Gift and Hobby Show. Each March the highlight of her month is the Indiana Flower & Patio Show, which features numerous displays of colorful flora, booths where gardeners and homeowners can peruse and pick out their new seeds, plants, implements, and accoutrements for tending and cultivating their yards in the forthcoming spring and summer. Assorted horticulturists and lawn care companies show off bouquets, sample gardens, and ostentatious flowers you’ll wish you owned.

It’s that time of year again! Today we three traipsed around the fairgrounds and gazed upon tiny, fragile parts of God’s creation, manifest through the works of people with much greener thumbs than ours.

One year later, my wife and I have yet to acquire this skill set. In fact, thanks to a particularly harsh and early winter, I still have raking to finish once the last remnants of Old Man Winter’s onslaught have thawed, and when time permits.

Theoretically, if I cared deeply enough to learn the fine art of growing non-weed lifeforms in enriched soil, I’d make the time to do so by taking away time from other activities that mean less to me. I could work less overtime, write less, sleep even less than I do now, skip family functions, have our electricity shut off so none of our entertainment devices work, and so on. Any of those options would inconvenience me somehow in a way that would make me whine.

Instead, for one day out of the year, we live vicariously through the vendors at the Flower and Patio Show. Good people with great displays of gorgeous flowers. As far as I can tell.

For variation we tried a few closeups that we hoped might inspire a deeper appreciation for the finer details that evade our everyday passing glances. Unfortunately I forgot to write down any of their names. I’m sure some of you know them. High-five to you folks!

These trained professionals are so adept, this year one company among them created color-coordinated displays, just to prove they can grow every color of the rainbow in a variety of formats. Show-offs.

JUST LOOK AT THIS. Yellow yellow yellow yellow yellow. They’re so smart and organized. It’s unfair and positively lawn-shaming.

We take heart in one certainty: the very existence of these flowers assure us that Jack Frost’s defeat is imminent. Sooner or later, hopefully within the next six months, spring will arrive and our memories of the first quarter of 2014 will feel a little less bitter. It’s sentries such as these that will be on the front lines of the War on Winter.

Also a telling sign that spring is coming: Daylight Savings begins tonight, that non-magical day when conformist America turns its clocks forward one hour because The MAN says so. Please accept this pretty flower as a token of our sympathy for the loss of that one hour of your life.