Wild Ferns & Dandelion Garland

Diary of a week

Monday, April 29

We hike the sway of a favorite hill. Scattered across its western face are dandelions. Hundreds and thousands. Some have their sunny faces open wide; others have gathered themselves in tight, making fluffy seed. I take note.

Tuesday, April 30

The memory of our wedding china swooped fully, completely, and without notice into my mind, like finding a snapshot in a forgotten shoe box. I’m not sure I’d thought about it since I sold it in our simplicity shift all those years ago. Lured by curiosity, I typed key words into the search bar, and wouldn’t you know, there it was.

Wednesday, May 1

I was rolling out pizza dough, spreading it with sauce, sprinkling cheese, when I said aloud, If that boy of ours surprises us this evening, there’ll be pizza for dinner. That boy lives two hours away and hadn’t said a peep about any plans to show up any time soon. But, wouldn’t you know, after two pizzas were baked and on the counter, who would come through the front door unannounced, with a grin on his face? That boy. That hungry-for-pizza boy. The next day, after I’d poked him full of pancakes, eggs, and sausage, and wrapped the extra pizza for him to take, he went rolling back down the road, headed east.

Thursday, May 2

It was a gift to mosey along. Take our time on the trial, off the trail. He cast his line into deep pools of water; Maggie Mae and I climbed a high, flat rock to watch. To watch him fish, to simply watch the river tumble by. It was up there, hidden from the rest of the world, where I found the ferns, growing from the rock’s pine-mulch-and-moss coverlet. Ferns like gems. Rare, here. An exceedingly delightful discovery, indeed.

Friday, May 3

I was in the cabinet maker’s shop. There was an unfinished cabinet on the workbench, and our fireplace mantle shelf sketches on the table. We were talking about wood, as we always do, when he walked over to a drawer in the corner, opened it, and pulled out a book. He blew the sawdust from the cover and handed it to me, A Reverence for Wood by Eric Sloane. You need to read this, he said. And now I’ve tumbled into an earlier world, an earlier time.

Saturday, May 4

She brought drinks and dessert; I made lunch. French baguette, hot from the oven, spread with cream cheese and spicy-sweet jam, with smoked salmon and local baby carrots on the side. Followed by meringues topped with rhubarb compote (spring’s first picking!) and a dollop of whipped cream speckled with vanilla.

We finished the afternoon by gathering closed-up dandelion blooms from that hillside where I’d spied them, and stringing them into dandelion garland, just for fun. (Choose buds that have a puff of white at their tips. Snip the heads off the stems, and thread them with a needle onto a long length of purl cotton. Drape the garland like a necklace in your window, and in a few hours’ time they’ll bloom into whimsical dandelion puffs all along the strand. The idea, we found here.)