There’s so much summer right now.  I thought I could fit it all in – but where is the Queen Ann’s Lace, the helianthus, the milkweed and ditch lily?  The scarlet monarda, and the dry, hay-sweet yarrow – and the flirty, fluffy cosmo?

Here are zinnia and nasturtium, and cornflower and petunias and hard, immature grapes as opaque as jade.  Echinacea and lisianthus, the Prairie Rose – who folds as many petals in her skirt as any spring ranunculus, buds curled high along her serpentine stem, and ready to unwind their treasure.

I don’t know if this is good looking, and I don’t really care.  All the pleasure was in the doing.  How lovely something can be in your own heart, never mind what others see.

I know we are supposed to do as much as possible with every minute of our time, in order to be worthy human beings.

But I need a slower tempo now.  More rests and sustains.

It feels good to drive a little ways on Saturday and buy the flowers Peggy grows.  It’s enough to hear the unmistakable voice of my friend Ann talking to the Lily Grower as I drive away from the market – and head to to her house in the meanwhile, to unload my bucket of flowers into the shade and wait for her to get home so we can visit.

The trees are flashing the silver behind their deep green leaves, like white caps measuring the currents of the breeze.  And the embankments are thick with stars of orange ditch lilies and bursts of blue chicory.  The stands of corn and distant groves of shade trees slope up and away, passing like July before you know it.

I can’t think of any better way to be filled by my time.

Some things you don’t want to know will take a year – even if you know or suspect everything will work out.

This month marks a year since I got the notice I had to move out from my home.  I know everyone wishes I would seize the chance – after so many years as a roommate – to find joy and self-expression making my own home again; a silver lining from the upheaval I went through.

But it turns out relocating was one upheaval too many.  After the move, I was too numb and exhausted at first to even believe in my surroundings, never mind inhabit them.  Then in late October, I started crying every day – and tears filled November, December, January and most of February.

The past week or two, though, a long-dormant feeling has begun to stretch and yawn itself into my awareness:  I live here.  For now, for as long as I can manage to pay for it, these rooms are my place in the world.  Yes.  It’s home.

Things don’t have to be perfect to be a blessing.

There might be another peony Sunday – but I’m not counting on it.

So here they are, the last Sunday peonies, retreating into their own soft shadows, like hazy reflections of June’s disappearance.

And I’m drifting off, too, my dears, into my own Sunday dreams.  It’s late already, and the breeze feels too good.  I’ll have to write you more when I see you next week.

I come to this empty page on Sunday night not knowing what I’ll say – or who I am writing for.  It’s one of my most constant and familiar places, this page.  A place I land weekly now, and where I have made my way through years of grief and hope.  Wherever my haphazard life had led, I always found something to say right here.

The hooks that you hang a story on are really so small.  A trip to the farmers market.  The uneven success of the garden. How I found the mock orange, neglected and forgotten, behind the old Taco Bell.

Just sitting in the garden with Ann or on the porch with Sherri – something so important happens.  I hear all about life – real, normal life, belonging somewhere and to someone. As we sit, the birds sing the very same song of place and pairing.  I’m like a sponge, absorbing a moment when we are outside our struggles, and our lives are just as we say they are when we tell our friend how our week has been.

Our weather forecast looks bad for the peonies.  They can’t endure a blast of 96 degrees looming on Tuesday like a bad trip to the dentist.  So between Thursday night and Saturday morning, I probably mooched my full 2022 ration of garden peonies from the yards and gardens of my most indulgent friends.

I’m not complaining.  I can barely take in the wonderment of riches I carried home.  The fragrance penetrates so deeply between memory and the present, it erases everything but its own clarion intensity.  And the buds are astonishing – full to bursting with petals that unfold in what seems like the blink of an eye.  The last thing I did before leaving Ann’s house was to cut a single, ripening bud from her golden Bartzella peony.  In the 45 minutes it took to drive home, the bud transformed into a creature glowing with layers of light, its heart crowded with thick yellow stamens.

I can’t do the peonies justice.  I’ve surrendered that aspiration.  All I can do is wonder out loud, for all to see, at the abundance of their magic.  And thank them every day – and I do – for making my world so beautiful for a while.

I wait all year for this time – when I can devour the peonies, heart and soul.
Indulge in their infinity of pink, as caressable as skin.

Yielding but self-assured,
like any living creature here to fulfill its destiny.

Encounter their improbable, unjustifiable beauty –
a pilgrimage of senses
to meet the force of that tenderness,
unfolding in myself.

Because there is no other way to find their blooms, to inspire their wordless fragrance – except by the light
of your own lovely petal shine.

These peonies did make me cry.  Their chirpy little voices, fizzing in my imagination like champagne.  “Oooh, you are so pretty!”  I said to them.  “We know!” they said – and I burst into tears.

And the breezy soft petunias, living on my most inhospitable fire escape.  They ring more than chirp, like bright wind chimes when I see them in the morning to water them.  I was supposed to grow them in my community plot, but I like them so much outside my backdoor, they stayed.

Here I am – between petunias and peonies.  They always know just what to say.

Saturday was a good day.  Peonies at Trader Joe’s, pulling creeping Charlie and bindweed at the community garden – and the cool spring sunshine came out instead of the rain we were due.  This morning I cut parking lot grape vines and lilies of the valley from around the garbage shed and bleeding hearts from along the driveway.  So you see – these flowers are all found except the peonies.

I might have said already – but cosmos and zinnias and bachelor buttons and strawflowers all have sprouted and have their first true leaves.  Mind – blown.  How do seeds do that?  On the other hand, the thyme and oregano plants on my fire escape are practically dead.  They don’t like something – the geraniums and petunias? or maybe it is too shady and cold? Or possibly they don’t like my neighbor smoking under my window? No, wait – that’s me who doesn’t like that.

I bought the hyacinth.  Everything else I cut from parking lot trees.

Twin crabapples by the abandoned bowling alley.  Apple tree behind the old Jamaican buffet that’s a yoga studio now. Lilacs in front of the shuttered Shopko.  (Not making any of this up.)

I couldn’t bring myself to cut even a twig off the stunted trunks of the transcendently incongruous white crab apples gracing the steel siding of the liquor store on my corner.  (Transcendent incongruity is not to be trifled with.)

We joke here in USDA Zone 4-ish about global warming working out for us.  But Summer came and took Spring away with 96 hours of bad August weather in mid-May.  The petals are everywhere – blown open in a terrible rush.  It’s as bad as a late frost.  You can’t re-set the time they needed to do their work.

So this is all of Spring that I could steal, crammed in one bowl.  Now let’s hope for rain.