Blooming Peonies

I love them so much I had one tattooed onto my right bicep.

Indeed. I am even trying to think of a way of incorporating a design of a skull with peonies in the eyes but my friend keeps saying "no marigolds, definitively more you."

I do love marigolds. And Dandelions because they are beautiful but if you try to pick them and put them in a vase they will die, but that their leaves make such a great salad, yet they are considered weeds.

I love birds foot trefoil a roadside ground cover that with bright yellow flowers that just happens to have cyanide in its leaves.

I love things like those which are juxtaposed. On one hand they are delightful to the eye medicinal, fragrant, delicious, or excellent at keeping away a pest on the other hand they are poisonous, die easily, have thorns, spread like disease, or are highly flammable.

That is my kind of flower.

But that is not why I love the peony.

I love the peony because my nana taught me hot to take care of them, watching the ants carefully cleaning the buds of each flower and the bees carefully tending to each bloom until they opened.

Then when they opened we would sneak out late at night and take shears and cut bouquets of peonies for each of our rooms and wash them carefully in the sink and remove the leaves. She would place a small drop of bleach in each vase and then place the peonies in our rooms.

I would come home to a room smelling brightly of peonies.

Then the bad part. One blooms. They all bloom. Then you rush around giving all your neighbors flowers putting peonies in every stinking corner of the house (which I LOVE!) and as soon as it starts it is over and the blooms are gone.

I try to savor the scent, enjoy watching the cats sniffing the air, my nephews stopping to check to see if there are any flowers ready to be picked. I sit in bed at night smelling the sweetly scenting air of my room softly breathing in the scent of the peonies and remembering myself as a little girl doing the same thing in my tiny twin bed.