Nature, in Bloom

by Phyllis Chesler

Flowers, flowers, everywhere—and I have the photos to prove it. This group are all fluttering far outside my plague-afflicted city where I sit, happily reading and writing, all the livelong day. From time to time I ask friends to send me photos of Nature—and they most kindly oblige me. When Bob Brannon sent me these brilliantly yellow daffodils, of course, of course, William Wordsworth’s well known poem immediately came to mind: I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud. Here’s how it begins:

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
 

I do not think of clouds as lonely. Do you? But see these other gifts that Nature has to console and uplift us. Donna Hughes sent me the sweetest, puffiest, and most colorful little bird on a wire;  she also sent me a magical photograph of snow in the woods in the third week of April, reminding me that winter cannot be far behind. As one ages, one’s perception of time changes, the seasons speed up, perhaps because we have run out of it or because we are moving more slowly—time is now faster than we are, it is giving us quite a merry chase.