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Find Your Passion UPDATED

Pattie Baker
5 min readAug 13, 2022

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Blooming passionflowers, 3 truths about bikes and cities, the best 6 bucks I ever spent, and a cross-country plan with a duck named Disco

BikeBloom upcycled bike tube earrings hanging on a passionflower vine

They say God used up all the glitter in the craft closet the day passionflowers were created. My daughters and I discovered them years ago. The passionflower vine is the sole host plant for Gulf fritillary butterflies, which are orange with three white polka dots on each wing. Supposedly, once you taste the ripe fruit of the passionflower (called a maypop), you will crave it the rest of your life. There’s a story about them in my book, Food for My Daughters. Every year they surprise me again. They grow wild, as do I. I call them fancy flowers.

I found a wonderland of blooming passionflowers two nights ago, for the first time this year, when I rode my bike up to see the sunset under the power lines, as has become my habit. Every year my city tries to kill the wild that grows there, and every year they fail. As they do with me as well.

And so it goes. And so it grows.

Get to Wonderland and find your own passion on the edges of nature.

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