April Flowers

Bow has had to put up with a lot of flower pictures lately. When I show them to him, he is singularly unimpressed.

But he will just have to bear with me, because, after all, it is spring, and that is the season for flowers.

Cherry Blossoms

In the morning, we wake up to beautiful birdsong. I let Brownie into the yard at sunrise, and I wish I could follow him, too, because the songs of the birds are beckoning me.

I have seen quite a few butterflies on my walks in the field, but they won't stop for a portrait.

In the afternoons, when it is no longer chilly, Bow goes outside.

The dogwood is already putting out its showy blossom, although the parts that pass for petals are still green.

Green  dogwood flowers

The dogwood blossoms are really set up to produce drupes, so  it's those little green balls in the center that are the buds which will one day soon bloom into flowers, which in turn will seem like fruit. But the things that look like flower petals now are merely bracts.

But Bow does not care about all that, and he sees no need to rehash it every time the dogwood blooms.

However, Bow does like to eat peaches and cherries and pears and apples, so he does see the usefulness in allowing me to go out and inspect the blossoms in our orchard.

And after Bow has gone to bed, I make another pass, and I get to see the apple blossoms on our brand new apple tree up close.

Beauty can be functional. April flowers can bring us edible fruit later on in the summer and fall.

Pear Blossoms

But for now, we can admire the flowers.

Apple Blossoms

Telling True from False

After it rained yesterday, I noticed that some of the tiny real flowers at the center of the dogwood blossom had started to open.

All these years of living here, and this is the first time I have seen the true flowers blooming. Up till now I had been focused on the showy white false petals that are really just bracts -- not seeing the flowers for the leaves.

Bow and I went outside and I looked very carefully at the tiny flowers at the center of the bloom. Some were open, and some were still shut. Many of the blossoms had a single little green flower at the center open, while all the other flower heads were still in expectancy. The clapping that you hear at the beginning of the video is Bow, in the outer pen, trying to draw my attention.

Bow is so expressive with his hands. In the video embedded above you can clearly see him beckoning for me to come and open the door, because he wants to go back inside.

Yesterday morning I struggled with Bow for over an hour, holding off breakfast, trying to get him to spell by himself. We are both very stubborn. But I wasn't going to starve him, and our life is very much dependent on civilized routines, like pouring cereal into a bowl and eating it with a spoon, and clearing away at the end of a meal,  so eventually I gave him a very limp hand to use, and he spelled with my hand in his. But the fit was very, very loose. This morning, I would not give him a whole hand at all. I would only offer a finger.

At first Bow was not happy with this, and he tried to gently pry my hand open.

 But when that did not work, he started spelling with my balled up hand in his.

This is not good enough to prove anything to the skeptical. But it's a way to loosen the dependency on my hand. I think if you look closely, though, you can  see that my hand is not the driving force behind Bow's choices.

In life, lots of what we see is only a show, to protect something else that we can't see. People say one thing and mean something else. They point you one way, when the real answer is in the opposite direction. There are flashy, showy petals that are really not petals at all. But sometimes if you look a little closer, you will discover where the real flower is hiding, right there in front of you where it has been all along in full view.