Blooming New England - Spring Flowers 2013

What flowers do you wait for each spring to signal the temporary but final demise of winter? I wait for them all. For the abundance that takes me by surprise, and lifts my heart higher than the warming temperatures.

The day awakes at 4 a.m., as do I. Especially now since it’s late April, pretty nearly May, and the birds start shouting out to their potential mates long before the more reasonable hour of 6 a.m.  The sun shines through my window more intently now too, since, you know, it is spring. The sun is doing extra urgent wake up duty in my house today as we adjust to the newest domestic nuisance - the curtain rod broke in the master bedroom this weekend.

Seriously, there was no point in even trying to sleep, so by 6:30 I hit the road looking for adventure and all the visual treats April offers.  I was still walking uphill all the way, when in mere minutes, I turned the corner from annoyed to grateful with the realization that all this would have been missed had I not been so rudely awakened by the sun, songs, and sleeplessness.

April offers us poetry month and the first flash mob of flowers, and so here is a poem about spring often attributed to Ogden Nash, or e.e. cummings, but now believed to not have been written by either. Googling a source today, decades after I started reciting this poem, I learned I don't even have the words right....so first is the version I learned, second how the rest of the world thinks it goes.  I think the version I learned should be credited to my mother as an early Happy Mothers' Day.

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BTW when I was a child and I asked my mother what her favorite flower was she always said "violets". It wasn't until I was much older that I asked "Is your favorite flower still violets?" and she told me "It never was". Violets grew all over the place near our house, and I can only assume she called them her favorite so we could feel good about picking them for her. Now I think she likes gardenia, but can I really be sure?

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My version....

Spring has Sprung

The Grass is Riz

I Wonder Where

The Flowers Is

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The other version sounds like the Three Stooges to me, I could almost picture Curley saying it.  Anybody else?. 

Spring is sprung,

the grass is riz,

I wonder where the boidies is.

They say the boid is on the wing.

But that's absoid.

The wing is on the boid.

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Get outside and enjoy the plethora of posies, everyone. Happy Spring!

All flowers and many more found this morning on my walk.

© 2013 by Alison Colby-Campbell