The Beautiful Green Days

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All winter long the mad gray giants raged, scouring and scratching at the ice covered sky.  Their brittle bone like fingers broke often.  With sharp snaps one piece after the other would go crashing down to the frozen earth.  There, adding their music to Winters. 




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Green is the color of the trees now.  They are growing fat too, on sap, and have covered their hands in soft leafy gloves.  No longer raging, they gently sweep puffy white clouds across the blue-blue sky.  It is the hue that covers everything, even the rocks that live in wet locales. 





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Early springs' favorite color is the many shades of green.  She dyes unchecked and I spin to see it all, missing twice as much as I catch.



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Summer, the season I love.

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Summer came home today.  He walked in slowly this year and nearly stole my breath away with his heat.  His shining smile is always following me.  Like before, his coming has made me happy.  Spring has left.  The last of her tears fell yesterday.  Here in the porch garden surrounded by nature, with summer warming my bones I will forget how he left me.  And how I had got cold. 

I dreamt last year that I had followed him.  I had left my bed my home and my yard to walk across the world.  Covered in filthy grime my feet felt worn.  I could barely place one in front of the other my clothes turned to rags on my back.  I had even forgotten why I was walking.  Then I came to a town to that place.  Where I looked up and saw him.  I knew.  Summer was walking past me going the way that I had just come.  The smile on his face mines, only for me.  I awoke tired, sad and lost.  Summer was gone. 

Yesterday I noticed that my friends the sparrows are also back from their winter vacation.  I often wish that I could migrate with them and see what they see.  Bird jealousy is not a pretty thing to admit to.  It is always exciting watching them get ready to leave every year.  Travel to new places is a passion of mine.  For some years now, I have not been able to leave.  I looked at them this morning while I was watering my vegetable garden.  They stood on our side of the street a large group of birds, talking.  About my garden I think.  How nice it looks, about the seeds I planted last week that will never be plants but did make for a nice snack.  They love summer too and have decided to help me in the gardens.  

School is out in celebration of Summer’s return and we have just had our first barbeque dinner in the porch garden.  Chicken, salmon, and hotdogs adorned the grill.  One bee, two flies and my whole family came.  Everyone squeezed in, found a seat and enjoyed each other.  We fed our bodies, while beauty planted fed our souls.  Summer has truly come home to me.  I will make him happy and he will be loath to leave.  I will lose myself in his radiance and he will burn love joy and peace into me.

He will stay with me this time I am sure.

Pollination or love at Springtime.

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There they are sitting on the porch feasting on sunbeams half-wild, pollinated and almost abandoned.

Spring is covering everything with her yellow dust.  She has every plant in sight growing as if today is their last day of sunlight.  I have been working like a mad woman, washing walls, cleaning railings and scrubbing screens.  Even so, my porch is not a garden.  My porch is uninhabited.  Wherever I stand or sit down to rest, spring reminds me that summer is coming.  She keeps dumping that sallow powder in my hair and on my chair.

This time around, the realization of a porch garden has been a lesson in delayed gratification.  Its completion is an act of love, a pleasure, a luxury.  Yet I feel overwhelmed and almost beaten.  I am anxious.  It seems like the first time just happened, but every mother knows that that is not so.  I have simply forgotten.  Carefully I press on, working on my porch garden, hoping that it will be full of plants before spring exhales her last breath and summer inhales it.

The plants are out of place, pots upon pots and potting soil, my family is put out of place.  We have a house full of guests; they sit in all the sunniest spots.  It is just like a delay at an airport around Christmas, time.  They should only have been passing through yet here they are.  A big beauteous mess of freshness greeting you every time you pass by.  Egg box seedlings, houseplants, sun lovers, herbs and vegetable plants are everywhere.  New slips and old slips some with roots and others without.  The connecting flight to destination unfinished is me.  They are all waiting for me to open the back door to the Porch Garden.

Yes, I am quite aware.  This is my idea, my space, my air.

The captivating Paeonia Lactiflora or love at first sight

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I recently met a Chinese Peony while out shopping.  It happened on a nice day in the gardening area of our favorite store.  We were shopping for seeds, from my special list called the living list.  I got lavender, spinach, corn and some mixed flowers.  We entered the super Walmart store through the gardening section.  This is normal for my family.  Racks and racks of seeds so plentiful, how many different types of corn is there?  This business of mine the selecting of seeds, the living list, where lavender is necessary for sight and for smell and spinach goes so well with rice.  Corn is my welcomed guest.  Present at every occasion of the summer.

My sister called me across the room away from the many types of same things and introduced me to Paeonia Lactiflora, saying.  Smell her perfume.  Look at her flowers.  What lovely curvy leaves.  Her flowers were a soft white, kissed with a suggestion of pink.  Each one the size of a standard cup cake.  With two stems twisted, candy stripe like, around stabilizing sticks 3/4 of an inch in diameter she stood four feet tall.  This picturesque flora was like a sweet-scented dream come true to my nose.  I could not leave the peony’s side.  I even introduced her to a total stranger.  Who walked away and left me to feel stranger.  Weird or not resistance was futile.  Paeonia Lactiflora and her twin sister now live with me.  When I pass a Peony in bloom, it will always be while inhaling with my mouth open.