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Lilies of the Valley

Sat, 20 Mar 2010, 04:55 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

“Hello!” I said, as I walked across the lawn.

Joe looked over and held out his hand and pulled on his blue stocking cap, “I can’t get this thing to stay on, today.” Irene looked up from where she was wrapping some freeze cloth around one of her exotic plants, and then she stood up and looked at me, “The wind is making my eyes tear.”

It was definitely hat weather, although I didn’t have one on.

Seeing the two of them working to protect their plants from the cold that’s coming made me think of the potted plants in our driveway and of our square-foot gardens with lettuce and chard and kale and the various seedlings just sprouting out of the ground.

Then Irene started to show me her plants: her roses just putting out new growth, the tall yellow-belled tropical plant that didn’t do so well this winter, some Vinca, and a dainty white flower that was vaguely similar to the wild garlic that’s blooming in our backyard but hanging off to one side.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the white flowers.

“Lilies of the valley,” she said, holding the tiny bells gently in her hand.

“And is this your garden walk?” I asked, sweeping my arm along the path in front of their raised bed.

She looked at me blankly.

“Do you know the song?” I asked.

“What song? Is it a bible song?”

So I sang the song my mother taught me years before I had any interest in getting dirt under my fingernails:

White Coral Bells upon a silver stalk,
Lilies of the Valley deck my garden walk.
Oh don’t you wish that you could hear them ring?
That will only happen when the fairies sing.

The watched and listened in silence. Irene smiled. Joe glanced down that the raised bed when I looked over at him, saying, “And look at the bloom on this Vinca.”

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License