I love going for drives here in my home state of West Virginia. Ever since I moved back here in 2014 (after living in Colorado for 40 years) I soak all this lush growth in like a desert flower drinks the monsoon rains. Don’t get me wrong…Colorado is stunning with the majestic snow capped mountains and the riffling trout streams and the golden quaking aspen in the fall. But, the Mountain State really is Almost Heaven.
The first tree to show up to the spring party is the Eastern Redbud. Drive out any two-lane blacktop in early March and you will see what looks like a lavender-pink smoke hovering in the edge of the road. Your heart sings when you joyfully announce, “The redbud are blooming!!! Look, look!” A couple of weeks later, the dainty white lace of the flowering dogwood shows up in the understory of the woods. It looks like the dainty tutus that stand straight out on a lithe ballerina.
There comes the sad day when the last of these blooms fall to the forest floor. Soon there will be Jack-in-the-Pulpits and May Apples, morels and ramps…peeking out from the leaves that carpet the ground where the redbud and the flowering dogwood made their debut a few weeks earlier. Daffodils and Naked Ladies and Snowdrops and Crocus dot the flower beds and foundations of old houses long ago reclaimed by the unrelenting decay a moist environment brings.
Next up are the irises of nearly every color of the rainbow. The former Mrs. FixIt and I scavenged the site of an old home that was demolished when the owner said, “Take what you want…I’ll never be back.” They were black! Well, a very deep inky purple that, in the right light, appeared black. We planted them two years ago in our respective gardens and this year they graced us with a plethora of gorgeous blooms. (Mine had a little hitchhiker among them…a tiny, yellow iris that somehow tagged along.)
Everyone’s flower beds are trying to outdo each other, everywhere you look. But the one flowering tree that comes out mid-May looks like dogwood. But the tree blooms after the leaves emerge. And they have a greenish tint to them. Four petals…just like the flowering dogwood earlier except these have pointy petals instead of the curved little cup we’re used to. I’ve tried to discover the difference between these two trees. The AI image checkers swear it’s a dogwood tree. This time I dove deeper in my search and found out there are indeed 30-60 different species of dogwood worldwide. They are everywhere around here, and they make my heart sing almost as much as the redbud. I am determined to buy one and plant it here on the homestead.
Mr. FixIt bought me a pink flowering dogwood one year and it was doing great. Then we had a hard, cold winter and she just couldn’t survive. You know…I’ll be 72 years old on the 13th of next month. I know I won’t have long to adore these beautiful trees, yet I plant them anyway. Why? Because it isn’t all about me. It’s about the grandchildren and the great grandchildren (we have four of them now.) Someday, their parents will take them for a drive and point out the trees and say, “Your great granddad planted that for GiGi one year so you would have something beautiful to come visit.
At least…that’s how I imagine it going.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers. Psalm 1:3 ESV
***Gratitude Journal*** Today, I am grateful for the friendship of my husband’s former wife and that we can demonstrate to the family what love and forgiveness can do in relationships.
#Dogwood #Redbud #WestVirginia