Artists have been painting lily pads for years, I guess I never gave it much thought. Here in Wind Lake Wisconsin can there be anything to compare to the beauty that Monet saw when he did his famous "Water lily" paintings? I would have never thought so. But Cindy and I took the canoe out early one summer morning on Waubasee Lake and as usual I took lots and lots of pictures. The sun was up but barely clearing the tree tops, it was a beautiful quiet morning, the surface of the lake was like glass, and the reflections on the lake were just wonderful. We paddled closer to shore and as the sun danced and reflected on the lily pads near the shoreline I was suddenly struck by the beauty of such a simple thing that I've so often taken for granted. So I painted this picture, and like always while I was painting I was thinking. Thinking of all the other wonderful things around us that we take for granted every single day, beautiful things so close and so darn common that we sometimes don't appreciate them. The laughter of a child, the colors the evening sun paints as it gets swallowed by the western horizon, the smell of bread baking on a cold winter night, the pattern of bright stars in the night sky. That person you wake up next to each morning. So much beauty all around us that it's just hard to see it all. Unless, of course, we pause to look.