Being Where

When I looked out at the flat, brown, dormant, leaf-strewn meadow at the end of winter I wondered how any green growing thing could upthrust through the dense layers of decaying vegetation. Of course, I needn't have. The meadow's waist high, now. Walking through it is more like wading. I can dive below the surface and cruise with the insects among the green undersides of things --



discovering, for example, the beautiful, flame-shaped, maroon-veined sheath from which clover emerges



or encountering a graceful daddy long legs



its eight limbs deftly seeking and finding purchase on leaves and stems.

Seeding and sprouting will have their way. This is not the only maple samara I've found caught waist-deep in a Japanese knotweed leaf, arrested as it dive-bombed earthward, hell-bent on planting itself.



The early grasses are flowering. Seedheads erupt from blade and sheath, then put out tiny, filamentous stamens and feathery pistils.



First come these tiny, delicate, waving parts; later comes the great, green, uprushing juggernaut.



It's all one big pregnancy,



from insemination to parturition.



Little wonder, then, that this blogger -- one tiny voice in the massive, roiling, babbling, bloggy chorus -- should feel a kindred restlessness, a kindred drive to make and remake her bloggy meadow, hoping all the while she'll be forgiven her shameless straining after botanical metaphor.

As Chance the Gardener would say, cutting back the field allows new growth. Or burning (sounds about right for Affiction), or even plowing under (there goes Anita, that old sod !)

There's plenty of room in one House of Toast for strained metaphors, weed photographs and certain observations (like this ladybug's uncanny resemblance to the Sacred Heart) --



-- that one might even call transcendental.