Surprise Lilies, cont’d

A small update…

Yesterday morning I went out to smell the lilies and noticed one stalk had been broken down in the night (lots of pets and roaming wildlife around; the list of possible culprits is endless). Three blooms were open and three buds remained at the head of the stalk so I picked the blooms, put them in a pressbook, and trimmed the stalk. I don’t have many vases, and none within easy reach that could handle a large, heavy flower like the lily, so I grabbed a tall beer mug instead (forgive me, oh Chloris). A couple inches of lukewarm water, a couple spoonfuls of sugar, and in went the stem.

This morning I awoke to two new blossoms dangling above the lip of the great stein. They are beautiful. Creamy pale where they dive toward the stamen base, the color bleeds to a rich pink as the petals flare outward and each is tipped with a daub of lavender. The last bud has yet to bloom but I am hopeful.

It’s a beautiful sunny day, blue skies dotted with small white clouds as picturesque and perfect as a Norman Rockwell painting, and my lilies are blooming. What an amazing way to end the month.

Surprise Lilies

As long as I have lived here, surprise lilies have bloomed every summer in two patches, presumably planted by some former owner (as I and my black thumb have planted nothing surviving more than a couple seasons). One patch out in front of the house ringed a small decorative tree which died long ago, leaving them isolated in the middle of an open, grassy yard; the other patch, out back, circled two still-lively oaks. But most years they hardly bloomed, and lately had managed only half a dozen blossoms altogether. I thought their soft pink faces were slowly dying out.

But this summer has been wetter and cooler than most, and when they began to bloom it was clear that this year the surprise lilies were going to live up to their name.

I’ve counted 66 buds and blossoms so far. Out front, the lilies have sprung up in their circle like an overgrown fairy ring. And the oaks out back are wearing a frilly pink skirt above their spreading roots. It’s beautiful, and totally unexpected.

What a lovely late-July surprise.

Hope Mosaic

That middle photo says it all: hope. Sometimes it’s hard to find when looking at the world around us, and even harder to hold onto once it’s found … but if you look hard enough, it’s there. Always has been and always will be.

My thanks to the Flickr members who supplied the photos: 1. Brewer’s Black Bird, 2. Hidden, 3. “The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”, 4. ~ You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (Thank You, Paul McCartney, John Lennon & Eddie Vedder), 5. {we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars}, 6. hard worker, 7. flower black and white, 8. Natural Bridges Sunset, Black and White – Santa Cruz, California, 9. hidden

Of Beauty and Butterflies

I went hiking the other day. It was breezy but warm and the nicest day we’d had for a stretch, and I wanted to get out and enjoy it. So I went to a bit of national woods not far away and walked a trail I’ve been through several times but had not visited in years. Much was the same, of course, and much was different.

An ice storm this winter hit the area hard. The trail often diverted from its original route to bypass tangles of downed trees and even where it did not divert there were colonies of stumps wearing skirts of sawdust. Some of the oldest trees in the area lay on the ground in cross-crossing lines with their roots in the air. It was almost painful to walk through. But there were protected areas, pristine little pockets behind hillsides and sweeping ridgelines, sheltered from the wind that accompanied the ice and caused most of the damage. In one of these pockets I stopped to rest.

A large shelf of rock spotted with mosses and lichens ran exposed through a narrow meadow-like opening on the steep hillside. It made an excellent seat. Surrounded by oak and pine, cedar and hickory, it was perfectly calm and flooded with warm mid-day sunshine. A small bronze-colored lizard with long dark stripes peeked out from under a tiny overhang in the rock that I hadn’t even noticed beforehand but vanished when I finally had to shift on my stone seat. A large patch of wildflowers swarmed the lower end of the clearing where the shelf of rock melted back into dark earth, violets and sheep shire, buttercups and phlox, false garlic and bluets scattered on the ground like confetti. Among their bright blooms, which drifted into the woods amid lazy sunbeams like something straight out of a Thomas Kincade painting, a few little butterflies hovered and flitted. Some were solid yellow, others colorfully spotted, and the smallest of them were white with orange piping at the edges of their wings. They tasted this blossom, then that one, seemingly unable to choose a favorite, dancing from one spring buffet to the next.

“They get to live their whole lives here,” I mused. “All they will ever know is this tiny paradise.”

I envied them. Beautiful and perfect, they danced on air. Their lives were short but enchanted, if only for one untainted afternoon. But, then, so was mine. I sighed and moved on, climbing farther and farther up the hilll until the trail broke out of the woods and wound the narrow edge of a bluff high above the crystal clear creek I had left just below the parking area. It was a lovely vista, a wide panorama of the creek valley and hills beyond, all broken ranges and steep hollows just beginning to don the golden-green cloak of spring. Redbuds flamed in purple brilliance and dogwoods floated like drifts of snow in the trees. I tried to soak it in, memorize every wrinkle of the hills, every sharp edge of rimrock, every curve of the creek so I could pull the memory out for later use and relive the simple glory of stillness and spring on a rocky bluff outcrop. I think I managed pretty well.

So now, even on long dark days when the sun does not shine for me, I can recall these memories and cling to the knowledge that it is not only butterflies who dance in the air and lead lives full of beauty.