Wildflowers

Waving in the wind, white faces of daisies, pink petals of cosmos. On the ground, sprinkles of periwinkle, or the white stars of asters at the mossy bases of shady trees. Trillium in the understory of a mountaiside forest. Masses of yellow dandelions and white clover and purple thistle and all their weedy green leaves on the open prairie.

I love them all.

Butter yellow daffodils on the Georgia roadsides between Savannah and Athens. Pink lady slippers on Old Rag in Shenendoah. The white peep of dogwood flowers in spring, when all the forest branches are brown and bare and you can see through to the interior of the woods to glimpse sprays of white on the dogwoods, the first of spring bloomers.

In Virginia, the magenta of redbuds along the interstate: so bright, so intense, so crazy beautiful you think they must have been planted. But their placement is irregular. There are seven trees in an uneven clump, a couple scattered behind at the edge of the forest. Another two over there, a thicket up the road.

They are wild.

I don’t know that there are many things that delight me more than finding flowers out in nature. They still surprise me, after all this time. “This beautiful thing just grows here. Nobody planted it. It exists without our interference or initiation.”

On hikes, I spend frame after frame on photographing flowers. Even if they are the little junk flowers that are everywhere in the world. They are magical. They are designed to attract. To attract pollinators who will ensure their survival.

And to attract me, who merely admires them.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.