Friday poetry challenge: Mulling over mullein

Is it pathetic to admit that some days the thing I look forward to more than anything is a particular patch of weeds growing beside the highway on my drive home from work?

After a day involving too much administrative claptrap, a long but productive meeting, and an infuriating encounter with a person whose idea of an apology is "I'm sorry you feel that way," I was driving home wanting to punch someone when I passed a mullein patch and saw that the weeds had started blooming.

Elsewhere mullein may be a medicinal plant cultivated for its power to attract pollinators, but around here it's considered a weed that flourishes accidentally in sunny spots that the highway mowers can't reach. A volunteer promoting health, attracting pollinators, and providing beauty--what's not to love?

I know the spots along my commute where mullein grows best and I look forward to the blooms every summer, my eyes searching the shoulder for yellow when they ought to be fixed on the road. Yesterday my husband and I were on our way home when I pointed out a cluster of blooming mullein, maybe six or eight plants in all, and he said, "We've got more than that growing just uphill from the house."

Well I didn't know that because my bum knee has been resisting hilly walks, but it's feeling significantly better after a cortisone shot so when we got home I walked right up the hill to the spot in question. A few years ago we'd had a massive dying tree cut down there, a process that had obliterated the few mullein stalks growing nearby--temporarily. Bringing more sunshine into the area has resulted in a mullein boom--close to 20 stalks rising up and starting to bloom.

One definition of weed is a plant to which we say We'd prefer your absence, but I'm not complaining about a bumper crop of mullein bringing beauty into my back yard. They make me want to squeeze out some doggerel, but what rhymes with mullein?

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.

Its fuzzy leaves
are never dull. In

woods where there's
rarely a lull in

songs of birds,
where trees are fallen,

just uphill from
a creek that's swollen,

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.
  

So okay, it's weedy but at least I tried. Who else will give it a shot? 

Summer is icumen in

This is the forest primeval I thought as I walked carefully through the mud into our upper woods this morning, except it's not the forest primeval--it's just a little fringe of woods at the edge of the upper meadow, with the early light filtering through the pines in a way that made it look lovely, dark, and deep.

The mud was deep and slippery thanks to recent frequent storms, but it ought to dry out this weekend as the heat wave hits. I made it to the Farmers Market before 9 a.m. this morning but still had to retreat to a shady spot to chat with a friend. Hot hot hot! Our electricity supplier has warned us to expect brown-outs as everyone who wants to keep comfortable cranks up the AC.

But it felt good to be out and about this morning. I saw a flicker and some hummingbirds, heard the kingfishers down by the creek, visited the chickens and admired the sun shining through sycamore leaves. Now, though, I'm staying indoors. After a long wet spring, the summer sun has come to stay.

 

The wild columbines make these lovely seed pods.

Sentinel beneath the birdfeeders.

Applause all around

I came out of Commencement Saturday with sore hands from applauding so much, and then I wanted to walk right over to the peony patch and applaud some more. How could those tight little buds burst into such massive gorgeous blossoms so quickly?

I'd like to ask the same thing about the students I clapped for as they received their diplomas. (Well, their diploma cases--the real thing comes later, after grades are submitted. Which reminds me of a great line from the Commencement speech: when he graduated from Marietta College in 1970, our speaker's diploma case contained only a bill for $2.48 for library fines--"And I don't remember ever checking out a book." It was a great speech and when I get the link I'll post it.) 

It seems like only yesterday that these bright-eyed students came toddling into my first-year classes wondering what the word syllabus might mean, and now here they are tottering across the stage on platform shoes and out the door toward jobs and adventures and real life. Go, you! Here's a round of applause!

And how did I celebrate my sudden burst of freedom? With birds and wildflowers, of course, and by diving into a good book. I have some projects around the house that need attention and my summer campus meetings start tomorrow, but right now I'm spending every spare moment doing as close to nothing as possible. Go, me! Here's a round of applause!

Birds, bugs, and beauty

I don't know which is better: hearing my youngest grandkid tell me she's "allergic to bad grammar," watching the middle grandkid holding giant creepy-looking insects in his bare hands, seeing the oldest grandkid win a prize for an Earth Day coloring contest, or hearing all of them correctly identify wildflowers--and ask about the ones they don't recognize yet.

Spring ephemerals are already fading at our house, but two hours north I saw a whole new collection of wildflowers, including squirrel corn, jack-in-the-pulpit, and four species of trillium. After a many-meeting-marathon kind of week, it feels really good to go outside and touch grass--or bugs or birds or trilliums, as the case may be.