Three Things about Walking with a Dog and a Cell Phone in the Rain

1.

Photobombing

2.

Windows

3.

Anticipation

Morning!

Glorious!

I can always count on F for beautiful flowers, great overnights, and lasting friendship.

Slow Travel

Florence takes Prince (ailing) and me on a golf-cart tour of the B. B. Park, downtown (with stops for snaps), and Billy's tree-crushed house, before returning to the prettiest garden I know.

Travel should always be like this: slow, in the company of a loved pet, and guided by a good friend.

Bell Buckle Arrival

At my friend's gate, morning glories, starting to close. Inside, I greet her, apologize, take the camera from the bag, head back outside.

Happily, she is used to me by now.

The pleasures of her company are many.

Saved!

review/return 3 papers

purchase 3 pairs of shoes, one cucumber, one bag of chocolate chips

send/receive multiple text messages/emails

read The New York Times/Facebook/blogs/recommended things

drive 54 miles

walk

photograph (84), upload to Lightroom, adjust/upload 3 snaps

notice one Widow Skimmer/Green Darner, several Blue Dashers/Ebony Jewelwings/Eastern Bluebirds/crows/Redwing Blackbirds, 1 Great Blue Heron, 2 adult/3 young Canada Geese, 1 fox

visit SOUL (where flowers once cleansed spirits)

 

A Family in Flowers

My mother loved flowers. She planted them, weeded around them, nurtured and watered and pruned them, and cut the blossoms to arrange. Every Christmas time, bowls floated camellias, and every spring rows of jonquils (she never referred to these as daffodils) waved in the front yard.
Her mother too had loved flowers, tending serried rows of blooms in the down-sloping back yard, the entire property lush with boxwood (never boxwoods, mind you, as this was Virginia and my grandmother was a formidable woman).

My deceased sister-in-law loved flowers too. She tailored her yards, in increasing sophistication at home (even installing a small greenhouse in her last one); in the county, she respected edibles like blueberries (hers were always lush and fresh and tasty) and tomatoes and snap peas (which I ate with great pleasure right from the vine) and heaped flowers in large barrels and baskets along the porch.

My niece, her daughter, also loves flowers, first helping to grow them and sell them in California, then as farm manager of an herb farm (where acres of coneflowers led down to river framed by mountains), then as an organic garden planner/installer, and now as a florist of such skill that I am astonished every time I see pictures of her work.

I do not grow flowers, but I love them too, for their colors and shapes and scents and attractiveness to bugs of all kinds. I had forgotten how much I love them until, with a new camera, I started snapping them again. And now I cannot imagine how I got sidetracked from them in the first place.

Flowers
by Wendy Videlock

for my mother

They are fleeting.
They are fragile.
They require

little water.
They'll surprise you.
They'll remind you

that they aren't
and they are you.

Sometimes I Just Need a Little Color

so I abandon bugs for blooms.

Like Going Home Again

This is where it started: love of flowers.
Like going home, but really at home.

(If you're unable to see the slideshow, see the photos here.)

That Time of Year

when folks drape a lit hairnet over a giant holly and declare it a Christmas tree. I'll leave it to you to judge.

Me, I'd rather just see the holly, or the beautiful flowers folks give those who don't get out much.

'Tis the season.

Beginning and Ending

At day's beginning: flowers against cloud-feathered sky.

At day's ending: my first Viceroy of the year resting at dam's edge.

One fine day.

Now I Remember Why

I used to love photographing flowers.

The color.

The sheen of cells.

The pollen.

Yes, the weight of the pollen.

Summer's Pleasures

Pink tastes like cotton candy, too sweetly sticky on the tongue, teeth rattling, hanging on for balance, like the flower flies and bees plumbing every blossom.

Day 7 of 40: Another Day That Changed My Life

I opened the door to flowers and behind them smiling faces. "We're your neighbors across the street. Come to supper tonight!" I did and by the time I left (late) I was -- Yes Jesus! as he likes to say -- fambly.

 

Please Don't Misinterpret My Silence

I'm shouting.

Hear me now?

Memorial Bench

The number 2
appears three times 
on the stone.
One of many
memorials in Abbo's Alley
honoring a beloved
Sewanee son or daughter,
this one reads
1982-2001,
Class of 2005.
Despite the rules
against picking flowers,
someone has strewn
a spring bouquet
across his name,
a stranger, probably,
like me, out for a walk
and then drawn
to sit a moment
by the fish pond.
May she or he
have thought as I did
of the young man
remembered here
before walking on.

Making a Garden Grow

The word palette, according to Dictionary.com, derives from Old French, the diminutive form of pale or shovel, resulting in small potter's shovel. A spade with which the painter mixes pigments, grows new colors, and plants them on a prepared ground.

Today, the palette at my feet invited me to do otherwise: hold it against the beautiful blue ground of sky. Imagine, then, a flower barrage bursting and floating above our heads in brocades and confetti streams and bouquets of intense color.

A garden of the imagination fit for another bitterly cold day.

Beautiful Things

I

My niece, a floral designer, makes beautiful things beautiful anew through selection, arrangement, and display. A skill, an art, a calling, of a kind, to make herself and others happy. I admire her dedication to making an environment beautiful, no matter how prosaic and small or grand and large. She brings the natural to attention, making others attend to what she loves.

II

Hanging on my study wall, over and behind my left shoulder, a Jim Sudduth painting glows. Although many would call it crude or untutored, -- the product of an untrained painter or dabbler -- mud and housepaint, brush and finger marks and pencil create an addictive vibration of life and liveliness, wedding earth, hand and eye. Whoever dismisses the painting as "naive" does not appreciate artful creation.

III

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity" brings together paintings and objects of fashionable daily life -- men's hats, women's corsets and bustles, designer dresses. In her New York Times review, Roberta Smith writes, "A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other."

IV

I love the basic wisdom of well-selected things and the people wise enough to love them.

Hydrangea

If you ask me my least favorite color, I'm likely to say green, but that can't be true: my favorite flower in bloom asserts green -- blush green like pistachio ice cream or lime sorbet with cream or the shadows in a baby's fat thigh folds.


Throughout town, snowball or torn-and-ruffled-paper-globe flowers dangle from hydrangea (water vessel, literally, from Greek) limbs like so many holiday ornaments shouting "Spring!"

So many, so liberal, so cheerful, so green -- even the deer seem to be leaving them alone, happily for me and my ravenous visual appetite.

Easter Celebration

CBS Sunday Morning presented a segment featuring Jonathan Singer, a podiatrist and master botanical photographer. (http://www.botanicamagnifica.com/) Each enormous photograph is a concise poem celebrating the minute beauty of flowers. Look for yourself (be sure to "View the Folio" linked at the bottom of the home page).

But before you do, read Mary Oliver's poem:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

I would spend it as Jonathan Singer has, making every day an Easter by paying attention.

The End of Summer

Summer ends officially on a calendar date, but it ends for me on the Saturday I sell my last scones and buy my last bouquet at the Saturday farmers' market. That Saturday was a week ago, and today I had to throw out my wasted blooms. Although I will continue to make scones for friends and students throughout the year, the wonderful Tracy City couple who grow these fabulous blossoms will not bring them to market again until next summer. Even on those Saturdays when I did not buy a bunch, I always enjoyed lingering over the display. Nothing else I know so lightens the market. I shall look forward to seeing them -- flowers and folks -- again next year.