Web communities are so amazing!

Those who know me well know I greatly appreciate flowers.

I think that God was at His creative best when he blessed our Earth with so many varieties of them.

I have counted my blessings daily this past year, since finally learning to use a camera that will capture their images for me to personally savor, remembering what I was lucky enough to see with each passing day.

Those who know me better, know that the flowers I love most are those with a scent (yep, this from a woman who has never been one to wear any perfume). It must be that both senses of sight and smell combined are magic for me.

Those who know me very well, know that my two favorite flowers are the gardenia (above) and the magnolia (below). Third in my heart is the white ginger (just coincidence that all three happen to be white…)

The photo above is one I took on my last visit to O‘ahu. Immediately after parking my car for a visit to Ker’s childhood home and opening the car door, I was pleasantly and overwhelmingly assaulted by the very strong scent of these blossoms, thrilled to discover they were blooming again. As if the scent wasn’t strong enough already, I walked over to the tree and buried my face in its branches, which you can do since the sidewalk meets stairs down to the home, where the tree trunk is strongly rooted a good twenty or more steps below. I inhaled deeply, getting carried away on the dozens of different memories the scent evoked for me.

The tree is quite huge, and it grows up straight and tall in the front yard of the Palolo Valley home Ker grew up in. I have adored this tree for more than two decades, but until snapping these two pictures of it I was quite contented to call it Pak Lan as Clara did (my mother-in-law), not really caring that it wasn’t the tree’s proper name.

Until now. Or to be more precise, until Flickr. (Bet you were wondering what my title has to do with all of this up to this point, huh.)

I posted the pictures there this morning, after indulgently spending my Christmas Eve playing with photo editing, and with the following description beneath it:

Shot 1 of 2: This is the blossom on a huge tree nearest the front yard sidewalk of Ker's childhood Palolo home. It has an amazingly strong scent and I have adored it for years… only now has Flickr made me wonder what its proper name is!

Can anyone help?

Within minutes I got two answers from the Flickr community (read them here), and a Christmas Eve conversation (and this post) followed.

There are so many choices now online, and on this Christmas Eve, I encourage you to give yourself this holiday gift:

a) Think about those little things you love most in life.

b) Do a search for one of them, your most favorite one, with "social media community for" as your subject prefix.

c) When you find a community which intrigues you, create your own profile page there, and get involved.

You know how easy “getting involved” can be by now right? You got it; you start to talk story!

Could not resist playing with one more copy of the previous shot, adding the trio to my Look Inside photo set.

Ho ho ho!

Postscript: If you find some winners, share more about them with the rest of us in the comments! Aaron had just mentioned joining a walking club online, and I have to find out more about that one, loving walks as I do… remember this at JJL?
Learn 5 New Things About Walking