Wildflower Walk

darin and i took our books and baskets and blankets and headed down the winding road to lotus for a walk through green rolling hills of oak and lupine down to the south fork of the american river.

feels like home, but everytime i go i notice something new.

darin brought along his camera with his cool lenses and took all these photos.

right now most of the wildflowers are tiny and petite, still growing, sloughing off the cold and frost and edging up pretty thin little arms.

when you look close it is a delicate fairy world, every slim blossom a wisp of maiden off to a ball at the palace of the earth.

here's a new one i discovered:

bufallo eyes,

five spot,

nemuphila maculata

it's not edible, unfortunately. what i really want to do is to forage and learn wildcrafting, but for now i'm still practicing identification.

california poppies are edible but don't get excited, i read that they don't really get you high!

down by the creek that leads to the river, standing on a logjam of tangled twig and vine.

i imagine a family of beaver gnawing their cozy home underneath.

down by the river, a lone scotch broom bush afire with yellow like sun on water.

wild hyacinth and something dainty and feathery white i want to call fairies' doilies.

pocket full o' parsley

the river, still high and swirling along the shores, catching up stone and shrub and leaf and bone in a mad rumble to the ocean. her mother the ocean.

by the river everything is huge and eternal and you are part of the rushing scramble like survival made tangible. 

up on the hills it's quiet valley oaks, wooden fences, lush proud fields sporting the bounty of spring.

and me, on what darin called my "earthen throne" finishing up annie dillard's The Maytrees (thanks missa) wherein every line is poetry. with its questions of love and loyalty, courage, sand, wind and barefeet. a shack, an oil lamp, and a place where parties include adults and children, ping pong, singing, boat rides, noise, whist.

the kind of book that steals you away into a land, and makes you cry a little to leave it.

happy mayday friends.

happy books and wildflowers. 

help me welcome the grandest may the world has ever known, or at least most dearly cherished.