Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

This is in no means a reference to that folk song, but still I must ask, where have all the flowers gone?  I don’t mean the kind one finds in a greenhouse or grows from a packet of seeds, something I haven’t attempted in ages.  I mean wildflowers on the side of the road or along hiking paths or languid trails.

I miss them.

When I was a young girl, okay, before most people can remember, I used to enter the flower-arranging contest our elementary school held each spring.  I wasn’t good at much, but I seemed to have a knack for arranging flowers.  Fortunately, I had plenty of opportunity to find the ones I needed.

Back then, there were no school buses, no lunchroom cafeteria.  We were expected to walk to school in all sorts of weather.  Our house was about three-fourths of a mile from the school.  So I’d walk in the morning, come home for lunch, walk back for the afternoon and then come home again.  Sometimes I rode my bike, but Billy Schmitt’s collie used to run into the road and attack anything that came by.  There was no way my fat, little legs could pump hard enough to escape that dog.  Finally, someone poisoned it, not me, and there was peace in the valley.

Winters were hard with all that walking.  Rarely did we have a snow day.  Where we lived, high snow totals were expected.  Girls were supposed to wear dresses at school, no matter the weather.  So to even get ready for school was exhausting, putting on snow suits over the dress, then boots and gloves, scarves and hats, over and over and over again.

But spring ascended, and along with spring came the wildflowers.  Buttercups.  Where are the buttercups now?  How does any child know whether he or she likes butter if they can’t see a reflection on their chin?

Daisies.  How can you tell with whom you’ll fall in love if you can’t pick the petals off a daisy?

They were all there on my walk to school, buttercups, daisies, tiger lilies, brown-eyed susans, violets, queen ann’s lace, along with sprigs of green to fill out the—

My vase was an empty frozen orange juice can that I decorated.  I honestly can’t remember if anyone had a real vase.  Perhaps I was too focused on my own efforts.

The afternoon of the contest, I would walk back to school from a lunch of toasted cheese, accompanied by cigarette smoke from my mother, and gather my rosebuds where I may.  Sorry, Andrew Marvell.  Gather my wildflowers fresh for the picking.  I’d arrange them while walking. When I got to school, I’d put water in the orange juice can and then put my arrangement on the bookcase.  I didn’t always win.  Sometimes I came in second.  But I think it was the enjoyment of the flowers and the arranging that brought me the most joy.

Now on the same street, where I shall never trod again, since both parents are dead, there is nothing to collect.  Houses have been built all the way down to the school, wilderness defeated in the face of mown lawns.  Mother Nature has been vanquished, and there’s no more delight in the walk.  There are school buses and a school cafeteria.  And, in even the best of weather, parents will drive their children straight up to the school doors because, well, it’s a new world.  With no wildflowers.