And because I was sitting on the ground, hunkered over the leaves off the walkway, and couldn't imagine answering Thinking about the inauguration poem and Diane's Op Ed piece in The New York Times and watching crocuses, waiting for them to open to the sun, hoping I'll see them open, I said, "Taking a picture of a crocus."
"Oh! Have fun!" she said and walked on.
When I came home, I looked up crocuses, those tiny fried-egg or Easter-basket-decorative blossoms that push up through leaf litter in winter. I read about corms and anthers and styles; I learned that the new corm develops on the old one, year after year after year. I read about the saffron crocuses on Crete and saw a picture of a fresco at Thera, which I studied so many years ago and so enthusiastically in college. I followed a link to the Liddell and Scott dictionary of ancient Greek (online!) which I used when I took the language, pouring through the many volumes in the Vanderbilt library. I read about the many many varieties on the Crocus Pages, admiring their tidily ravishing beauty. I searched for poems that mention crocuses on the Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets sites, stopping to read the interviews with the inaugural poet Richard Blanco. I found two poems I like -- "For You Today" by Jessica Greenbaum and "Poem" by Jill Alexander Essbaum.
And then I finally looked at my pictures.
And they were enough.
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