Thursday, April 05, 2007

Thursday Thirteen


1. The moon last night was nearly blood red when I looked out the kitchen window about 8:45 p.m. I could see it through the trees and it looked quite ghostly.
2. I have an Audubon society book for the southeastern states that I refer to quite frequently. Every year I have to look up the wildflowers because I can never remember what they are.
3. I also have a book on wildflowers by Leonard Atkins called "Wildflowers of the Appalachian Trail." Atkins lives in my county and I have met him. Of course I did an article on him.
4. My mother loved wildflowers and she and a friend would walk the woods every spring and into the summer in search of unique or unusual wildflowers.
5. She could identify jack-in-the-pulpit, chicory, and floating bladderwort on site.
6. I never have been able to do that but I've also never applied myself to learning the names of the wildflowers.
7. One year in April I called Mom and asked her to come and walk with me to the back of the farm to see a patch of wildflowers.
8. The woods were full of trillium, which apparently is native to the area but not common. My mother was ecstatic at the find and I remember she was quite childlike in her delight of the flower.
9. The following year Mom was too ill to visit the trillium patch, so I walked there with my friend B., who's mother had just passed away.
10. We stood in silence a long time looking at the wildflowers, each thinking, I suppose, different thoughts of our mothers, hers having just passed away and mine not far from following.
11. I cannot visit the trillium now without thinking of my mother, who died a few months later, and my friend.
12. We are forever bound by the deaths of our mothers in the same year.
13. We're also bound by the wildflowers, my mother and B. and me.

2 comments:

  1. I just posted a parkway wildflower in my easter mix, but I don't know what it is. I met Leonard. He gave a slide show presentation in Floyd one year and I met him again at last year's Roanoke Book Fair.

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