Life still has beauty to offer

A poem for the day

Jun 01, 2025

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The sunshine on Tuesday put me in a good mood, and I strolled across our lawn, taking photographs of flowers, some that I planted and some that grew of their own accord.

The tulips I planted, along with the single rose bush that finally seems to be flourishing and the stars of Persia, also known as ornamental onions — balls of pointy purple stars with small green nutlike centers.

The Canada anemone, which takes over the crescent-shaped plot in the center of our semi-circular driveway this time of year, moved in without invitation, although I have encouraged it by letting it grow while, at the same time, yanking up the maple sprouts and other undesirables.

I have to get the maples early, preferably when their stem is still green and flexible. If I wait until the stem is 4 or 5 inches long, it turns woody, the roots take hold and it feels like a tug of war when I pull on it, with Earth on the other side.

The flowers have seasons, most of them brief. The crocuses come (and go) first, then the daffodils, then the tulips. We’re in a purple phase now — the stars of Persia on their long, elegant stems and the floppy, lovely irises.

The anemones are in their glory now. It’s a muted glory, since they’re small, each plant offering a single white flower about an inch across on a short stem that sticks up from a pinwheel of dark green leaves. But hundreds of them scattered in white splashes across a garden’s green background are a cheerful sight.

The blue flax — Lewis flax, apparently — is another surprise, but not a native one, according to my research. It’s spreading in the garden by our back driveway, where I tossed a handful or two of wildflower seeds a few years ago.

The back driveway plot is the one I worked for years to make into a productive vegetable garden, saving kitchen scraps for compost and placing seeds in rows in the dirt every spring. Cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, tomatoes and green beans were the regulars, while I experimented with corn, peppers, eggplant, carrots, broccoli, watermelon and cantaloupe. Of the experiments, only the peppers ever ripened fully, and that happened only once. Tomatoes and cucumbers grew abundantly that same year and Bella made salsa and canned it.

No one else liked fresh salsa, so I ate it all winter, spooning it onto crackers or corn chips topped with cheese bubbly from the microwave.

Most years with the vegetable garden, my ambition flagged just as the weeds made their final charge and drove me from the field.

Even then, with weeds 3 feet high covering the plot, we’d get more tomatoes and cucumbers than we could eat. I’d leave them dangling on their vines to swell and split in the rain.

I prefer flowers. They can outcompete the weeds, with a little help. Their appearance is unpredictable, which makes it exciting. And I get more satisfaction out of admiring them, day after day, than from waiting three months to gorge on cucumbers.

Now, leafy stems about a foot high crowd all the garden plots. By the end of August, they will be 3 and 4 feet tall, with bright yellow flowers and a cone-shaped center. These, the internet tells me, are heliopsis helianthoides, known as smooth oxeye, oxeye sunflower or false sunflower. I don’t know how they got here, but they are spreading, a flood of yellow for summer’s finale.

The days for me and Bella include hours of silence, confusion, frustration and boredom in our eighth year after her Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis.

Those feelings are complemented each day by my worry, anger and incredulity at the national news.

I accept all this, having no choice.

But life still has pleasures to offer.

5:40 a.m. on Wednesday, I looked out my office window at the grayness of the day. Birds flitted in and out of the evergreen next to the window and called out. The anemones in the center of the semi-circular driveway were closed into little white fists. They would open soon with the sun.