The Magic of a Summer Morning

The magic of a summer morning doesn’t last long in Texas. Shooed away by mosquitoes, melted away by the rays, the magic disappears. But if I wake up early, I’ll catch that sliver of magic when petals yawn and stretch, when the cardinal chirps for his mate. That moment before the dew is gone, the sky is thin and pale and blue. The cicadas are still asleep. The magic lives in that moment before freshness vaporizes, while dreams are still new and on my mind. And it was at a moment of magic one morning that I noticed that a cantaloupe vine has sprung up among my petunias.

A sprout from a rogue seed left over from last season when husband-dear planted cantaloupes and watermelons in my beds. The seed escaped last summer. The seed resisted harvesting. The seed hid and hid all those many months. Ensconced in the dark, buried in the cold. Waiting. Waiting. Until now, unnoticed and undetected, the seed became a seedling. Tiny. Unobtrusive. Sneaking out of the soil under the skirt-cover of my purple petunias. My garden beds had a make-over this season transforming from vegetables to flowers. But this seed.  This cantaloupe seed endured the harrowing of the soil, the new flowers moving in and the new management take-over. 

Dew droplets line up along the edge of the cantaloupe's round leaf as though lining up for a can-can choreographed by a Broadway choreographer. The cantaloupe's deep-green leaf builds a canopy of shade in anticipation for the melon. The huge leaf gratefully gathers dew drops in preparation for the day's heat.  

It takes water and fortitude to survive the summers in Texas, as anyone who has lived through one will tell you.  I filled my back porch with greens and blooms earlier during the cooler spring months.  My back porch buds and I form an unspoken alliance as survivors of the day’s heat. We hydrate. We endure. And we meet again during the sliver of magic in the morning.

Morning's Glory

The morning glories on my pack porch open their trumpet deep purple blooms every morning. When the sun brightens the inky dark, when the mocking bird begins the day's announcements, when the loudspeaker from the nearby air force base broadcast the notes of our nation's anthem, those purple glories open up.

The crepe myrtle, unpruned, untended,  infused with fuchsia tissues, obscures the line of the horizon from view. The bright green sweet potato vines root in the bed edging the back of the house. My wire hanging-baskets spill over, showing off the purple of the purple jew and the needles of the asparagus fern, and the wrinkles of the Boston fern.

But my eyes always return to my morning glories. I can set my clock by their opening blooms. Daily they resolutely fold their petals up in the face of the sun's brassy rays. Daily their petals bunch up shut against the overwhelming radiating heat. But in the morning after resting in the dark cool. In the morning before it gets too hot. In the morning shaking off their sleepies, and forgetting yesterday's heat, my morning glories open wide and big.

My Mother's Day Gift

On May 10, Mexican Mother's Day, my adult daughter and I drove to Lowe's.  She smiled at me from the passenger seat, a funny switch from her permit driving days when she had seized every driving opportunity. We ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the succulents, the annuals, and  perennials. The labels on the pots confuse me. Perennial. Annual. Does an annual  flower come back every year or does a perennial come back every year? Don't both words come from "annus",  the Latin word for year? I know I come to Lowe's every year to replenish my flower bed. Am I an annual or a perennial? Everything has a label. Drought resistant. Hardy. Full sun. Yes, we live in North Texas.

Three bags of garden soil and $86 of bedding plants later we headed home to start my flower bed make-over. My work-out-3x-per-week daughter whipped the  dead grey soil up with the  live dark-chocolate soil.  The rusty rake and hoe had both misplaced their handles in the metal shed over the winter months so she stirred the soil like a pot of stew with her daddy's pointy shovel.

The petunias, marigolds, and daisies settled into their new dirty home, their roots slowly finding their way underground.  My nails manicured with dirt tips, my toes pedicured with a gritty, backyard, soil scrub. I welcomed my flowers to the flower bed that skirts my back porch.

A few days later on American Mother's Day, my starting-her-own-life-now daughter brought me a can of worms. "Happy Mother's Day," she beamed.  The tube-shaped segmented animals scientifically known as "lumbricus terrestris" saluted me from beneath the lid. I could only stand to watch them for a few seconds before my squeamish self took over.  Before I replaced the lid on the can, I whispered to my Mother's Day gift, "Eat, chew and poop dirt."