Home

What’s There to Say About Poppies?

March 31, 2015

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized , , , 1 Comment

The poppies started showing up last week, here there and everywhere, and this week, some in our yard.P1000408

When they arrive I want to celebrate.  It’s spring.  I thought about poetry in their honor.  Could I do a riff or a twist on Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”?  It didn’t work.  The following is all I could come up with.

Gluttons for sun,
they shine it back,
closing at night.

They persist, pop up
every year, sometimes
fewer, sometimes more,

not in the same spot,
windblown annual
new every spring.

Poppies.  Spring.
Nothing more
to be said.

While poppies are the most colorful sign of spring, it is the mesquite tree that has the honor of signaling when winter is really over and there is no more concern about frost.P1000414

You can see how close I had to get to one branch of the tree to show the leaves beginning.  The apache plume, on the other hand, didn’t wait for any signal.  It went ahead and bloomed.P1000415If there are no poppies where you are, I hope the daffodils are coming up!

Advertisement

Happy Autumn!

September 22, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Autumn’s just beginning, but I’m thinking of the tree outside my window at my old house: a small red-leaved maple.  Beside it in the front yard was a small green-leaf maple, so in fall we had a two-toned orange and red carpet across the lawn.

Autumn is my favorite season, though I don’t dislike any of them.  It’s the time when my energy rises and all things seem possible.  “Maybe this is the year I reach my full potential,” my heart sings, even as my head labors to track all the events filling the calendar.  So much of our activity rises and falls with the school schedule, though no one in the household has been in school for many a year.  This is the pattern of society, and I think the weather has more to do with it than we may want to believe.Now, instead of the decades-old maple tree, probably planted when the house was built, I look out my window at a small mesquite tree, just six years old, which I planted myself.  It too will turn color later in the season, though its color will be a rather uninspired yellow.  It and I have settled in together.  It is now growing at a steady pace, and so can I.

On the day I began drafting this post, a roadrunner appeared in our back yard.  This pleased me greatly, because I want our yard, small though it is, to be a wildlife haven.  How he came in I have no idea, but he was finding good things to eat.  He wouldn’t pose for the camera, but here he is enjoying the shade of the small mesquite tree.

Visitor