Wildflowers between April Showers...

Last week we left our one slim acre and traveled east to lend a nurturing hand to my Aged P (an aged parent, as per Charles Dickens' Great Expectations). These days our ninety-six year old mother needs some assistance and my brothers and sisters and I have been coordinating shifts. During my five day shift while my mother took her midday nap I would take some exercise. My midday walks led me up a familiar stretch of country road I used to walk as a boy back in the day I didn't have a lift to town five miles away. It was a lonely road those days, a busted up stretch of pavement where snow banks piled up roadside in winter and sweet clover grew in summer higher than my head. But no one was a stranger those days. And even if you were, drivers would still lazily lift a hand and  forefinger in greeting as they leisured by. Many memories as I walked along. It was this stretch of road where I was adopted by a yellow and orange tabby kitten I named Winnifred although Winnie, I later learned, was not a "Winnie" but a "Fred."

Years later I traveled the same stretch by bicycle, a boy's full-sized Columbia 36"wheel bike my parents purchased second hand from a party in a neighboring town. The money most likely came from my allowance but I have no memory of it. In its day the Columbia was a top of the line model, replete with a buzzer style horn that never buzzed and a headlight that never lit. The balloon tires tended to go rogue on sandy stretches of road and throw its rider in the dust. Our relationship was one fraught with flat tires and a considerable amount of walk and push.

My walk took me a mile or so up a gentle grade to where the road crossed a canyon in which I hunted groundhogs in the spring and quail in the fall during my nimrod days. The day before I noticed a scattering of early sunflowers (American balsam root) on a west facing slope, their cheerful, golden faces announcing spring.

When I was a boy and the sunflowers bloomed, I would hunt the hills for spring wildflowers, gather some, take them home to my mother, and present her with a wilted fistful of spring. Today six decades later the sunflowers beckoned again, an invitation to search the sagebrush slope for the first wildflowers of spring. Why not, I thought, as I spied a game trail that tracked down slope to the roadside. I struggled up the trail, grasping branches of sage for support, pulling my way uphill. My feet seemed to catch on every little twig, wander into every badger hole, trip me up on uneven ground. Stopping often to catch my breath, I stumbled my way through the brush to the patches of sunflowers, peered beneath clumps of sage for sprigs of new grass where I knew the wildflowers would be. And there they were, not many, as it was a bit early for them, my favorite wildflowers, their beak-like blossoms perched on fragile stems:"shooting stars," (Dodecatheon pulchellim) our favorite name for them although other gatherers called them bird beaks or bills because of the dark purple, pointed bases extending from swept back pink petals. These striking little dainties belong to the primrose family. A careful search of the area yielded only a couple dozen, far from the days of fistfuls. I had hoped to find delicate "baby faces"(Lithophragma glabrum), tiny white doilies with reddish navels but they were nowhere to be found. I did not want to make the two mile return trip on all fours, so I quit my search and stumbled back the way I'd come. Just as I was about to negotiate the game trail descent, I happened upon a few stalks of bluebells (Mertensia longiflora) which I plucked and added to my sparse handful....

Which I delivered to my mother a half hour later. To see the smile on her face was well worth my struggle in the sagebrush. I'm fairly certain my fistful of spring reminded her of the wildflowers she sought and plucked herself when she was a girl. For this gatherer the flowers were those of memory, too, but if I told you I gathered them with the ease I did in childhood, instead of from a seasoned three score and fifteen years, it would be a bald-faced lie.



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