flowers
In winter the flowers are dry sticks or vanished. The trees are black limbs against a (usually) grey sky. Yesterday, I found green stallks of daffodils and crocus breaking through the cold ground. Throiughout the months of winter the bulbs hide beneath the grouond and the snow. Now the time has come to grow. Soon yellow daffodils were bloom in my front yard. Jon helped me pick out more flowers to put on my journal page. The one below is the wild rose, Iowa's state flower. In early June a person can find it in ditches and fence rows all over Iowa. Today the sky is blue and, with no clouds to hide it, the sun is shining. Wednesday, the sky was dark; rain fell. I came out of the grocery store to find sheets of hail pulmetting down. The ground was covered with thumb nail size ice. Now I think of blue skies and flowers to come. And in June the wild rose, one of my favorites, will spread its sweet smell. In May the white and purple clover blossoms will bring unexpected fragrance at stray moments. In July, a weed is one of my favorites: Queen Anne's lace, a white flower that does look like frilly lace. We live in such a beautiful world. Gerald Manly Hopkins wrote "the world is charged with the grandeau of God...", a beautiful poem about the soil and toil of man and the beauty of God's world.