SPRING ENTWINES TRELLISES WITH HUMAN HEARTS

There is a little book with little stories whose words are entwined with little flowers. The colorful flowers appear to be a continuous garland weaving in, out and roundabout all the individual letters--here a tiny blue forget-me-not, there a cowslip bell complete with a bee asleep inside. At the bottom of a "c" drips a yellow daisy. Around the top curve of an "a" there is a delicate pink rose. And the big capital letters at the beginning of sentences are masterpieces of flowery artistry.

It is really difficult to keep one's mind on what the words are saying. At least it is for me. I am bemused trying to identify the tiny blossoms while all the time marveling at how the artist has so cleverly tucked them in under the hump of the "h" or the loop of the "l".

I've often thought of how pleasant it would be if one's conversational words could be delivered with such color, beauty and suggested fragrance.

So it is with my activities these days. I know that I must cook some, wash dishes, make beds, run the vacuum, swish the dust cloth, but I'm hardly aware of these things for they are done in short spurts between the "garlands" of moving a phlox here, a rudbeckia there, taking up a clump of glorosia daisies and placing it beside a larkspur so the two colors will complement each other.

I fondle my little packages of zinnia and marigold seed, carry them about like secret wealth in my smock pocket before consigning them to the good earth, almost one at a time to prolong the pleasure, mentally savoring the big beautiful flowers they'll become, maybe some day even as beautiful as those printed on the package.

Professor Hilty said that as a youth he and his brother spit on their fishing worms after having squiggled them onto their respective fishing hooks before flipping the lines out into the water. I know what that was for. Sometimes I spit on a seed when it is down in its bed before drawing the brown cover over it. Once I spit on a quartered seed potato when planting it and all the little potatoes turned out cross-eyed!! So I've slacked off on that.

One would think from all my wordy paragraphs about my flowers that I have a regular showplace. Not so~! Depending on the progress of the season there are purple patches of hen bit in my yard, a host of dandelions buttoning down the grass lest it fly away in the spring winds. Green spears of wilds onions (some say, correctly, wild garlic) rear up like a cluster of green hat pins everywhere you look, further anchoring the green grass.

Furthermore, I have a "thing" about a volunteer that comes up, not in a neat row or some specially appropriate place where I would have planted it. Its force for life touches me and I let it be, even if it is a tall hollyhocks right in the middle of a flagstone walk. No, nothing special at all here. But the mockingbirds come, the purple martins, sometimes the hummingbirds and all the others.

Grasshoppers hop as if they are in a summer hay field. Rabbits too. The beautiful black dog and the white cat with the yellow tail pass through, sometimes stopping for a friendly rub. Night crawlers sometimes come to the surface to see what the sunshine is like and the robins wrestle with them all day. Grubbies lie beneath the soil, but I know they are there. Old blinky-eyed toad sleeps under the hollyhocks and, of course, there is always the striped garter snake somewhere. No, nothing special.

Once such a healthy larkspur came up in an expanse of green lawn that, much to the consternation of my yard mower, I let it be, even protected it form the hungry mower by a four sided brick fort. It was such a delight when the bumble bees came. Sitting close beside it I could almost make out a tune to their busy buzzing, could even detect words as clearly as I detect the words of the raucous rock singers, and much easier on my eardrums.

When this larkspur went to seed, I did have the foresight to cut it down, carefully, and sprinkle the ripe seeds in a more propitious place, that is propitious from the mower's viewpoint, lest I have a multitude of little brick forts all over my yard and the buzzing gets so loud I'd have to wear ear muffs and thus drown out the cheerful chortling of the purple martins and sweet gossiping of the goldfinch.

I'm going to apply for a government grant some day to study the effects of bird song on the germination and growth of seeds. My thesis will be that I think mockingbirds sing so loudly over or nearby a seed bed, especially my three, Little Mocker, Songer and Melody, that the vibrations help to split the covering of the cotyledons even though the seeds be two or three inches underground!

Maybe as you have read these words, you've envisioned little vines and flowers and birds entwined around them--flowers, vines and birds that never wert!

REJOICE!