It is SPRING.
There are carpets of crocus beneath fluttering daffodils and the air is sweet with daphne. There are hellebores and violets and grape hyacinths and bushes with strange fuzzy red leaves and new little knots of succulents and shrubs that are growing fresh and new in fall colors, like flowers trying to be autumn leaves, and new rosettes of leaves beneath clusters of last year's old sticks. The teenage crabapple in the parking strip is definitely not dead. Everything is swelling buds and shiny stems and tiny electric green leaf-tips and weird crumpled plant babies. They are exactly like newborns: impossibly tiny, slightly squashed, a little dazed, and so beautiful it hammers you in the chest. I was walking through all of this with my mouth hanging open, trying to take it all in, and then I was standing under a magnolia tree, looking up at ivory flowers just barely pink bursting out of fuzzy brown pods. One of them was fully open and in the center of the flower was this tiny, perfect round pincushion of narrow petals standing on end, in that barely blush color, and I just stopped and muttered,"Aw, come on." It was 100% not real. Not real! Nothing can be that beautiful in real life. And then I looked up, and the sky was blue, that deep, deep blue that fills up your chest and lets you breathe again. I forgot it could be that blue, after a winter of watery sunlight and washed out skies. And I was there, looking up through magnolia branches and pale pink flowers into that blue, blue sky and breathing and being alive. Later, I took out the trash, and I looked up, through the narrow break between the houses and past the power lines, and the stars were so bright.
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AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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