Tues, Mar. 18
... Raindrops on roses
The crocus in this layout reminds me of sloshing through the pastures as a kid, picking handfuls of crocuses as soon as they bloomed to put on the kitchen table. We'd dress up in our rubber boots, sweatshirts, and semi-warm jackets, and fight tooth and nail against taking gloves or toques with us, because it was just too warm. After all, if there were flowers, it must be spring, right? Never mind the fact that the flowers were crocuses, the earliest of all prairie blooms.
We'd traipse across the yard, through my Grandma's garden, across the old-car-graveyard, where the vehicles that don't run anymore are put to rest (because who knows what parts you might use one day), and then came the fun part. The corral. In the cattle chutes, over fences (along thet op if you were really brave), through barbed wire, onto the roof of a feeding trough (just to make the journey more interesting), and through another fence, and we were in the pasture.
Last fall's long grass reaching up to grab our pants out of our rubber boots. Huge puddles and mini-sloughs to stomp in and try to push little siblings into. Dried cow pies to avoid--or step right in, depending on your preference. Narrow worn paths in the grass to race along and gain an advantage with.
And scattered somewhere in amongst the dead, brown grass and patches of dirty melting snow were the crocuses. Sometimes only two or three, sometimes ten or fifteen at a time, they were poking their purple heads out of the bleak landscape. Tiny promises of spring with little yellow centers in the middle of last fall and winter's ruins.
We'd pick them, traipse back across the yard, leaving a trail of mud the whole way, and take them in to the dinner table. Their stems are so short that we couldn't put them in a vase, but there would be a big bowl filled with crocuses in the middle of the table that evening.
infinite || abyss
posted at 1:08 a.m.
