Spring Flowers

Spring did officially arrive this week, even if snow is forecast from now through Sunday at my friend Mary Ann's Calamity Acres Hobby Farm in Kansas.

We're having frost here at night in Tennessee and only a few of our daffodils are in bloom yet. But it is spring and I've put away my winter bedspread and all the plaid wool throws. There is one other thing I did this week. I took down a certain frame and changed the picture in it.

On the first day of summer there will be sunflower petals against a blue sky in the frame, and on the first day of autumn a tree with flame-colored leaves will take its place. Winter's picture of red dogwood buds encased in frozen ice bubbles actually goes up earlier in December than the first day of winter because--well, it just does.

This week the dogwood came down and pink apple blossoms went up.

Our son Defee took these pictures a few years ago and he and our daughter-in-law had them framed for our Christmas present. The quadrennial task of changing these pictures has become a simple pleasure I enjoy so much, both for the beauty of a picture I haven't seen for a year and for the thoughts it brings of the young man who held the camera for these shots.

I don't have any pictures to illustrate the lines below by Anne Morrow Lindbergh but we can close our eyes and imagine how lovely the real flowers must have been that Anne arranged for the house called Long Barn that she and her husband rented in England after the kidnapping and death in America of their first child.

Mary Ann in Kansas, with snow possibly falling right now, I'm dedicating these lines by Anne Morrow  to you. It will be truly spring there soon. I promise!

"We have put the blue iris in the long room, where they catch the color of the

Venetian blue glass and the greens and blues of the tapestries;

one bowl of hyacinths on the stool by the fireplace in the big room...

and one in the "Italian room" or little in-between hall,

with the amethyst-colored bottles.

Another pink hyacinth in the sitting room in the sunny window.

The pots of tulips, one red, one yellow,

on either side of the mirror in the front hall."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh The Flower and the Nettle