The azaleas have peaked and we are actually on the slippery slope down into summer here in Houston as of today, Saturday. But it's still nice.
This is the time of year for tulips and daffodils in people's carefully tended front yard gardens, for the oleanders to begin bursting, and for the people who suffer allergies to begin lining up at Walgreens or going to their doctor's offices for shots.*
This post is for Tennessee.
If there's a stranger spring ritual in the entire country, I've never seen it and remember - I live in TEXAS.
Get in your car during April and drive to Nashville. Take the Trace if you can. Then find a neighborhood where the houses have nice big green lawns (for example, just get off the freeway anywhere). Try a weekend when more people are home. Then just drive and let your mouth drop open as you see guys in bermuda shorts and fishing caps out mowing down acre after acre of naturalized paperwhite, purple iris, and daffodil drifts that roll across the hills that their homes are built on.
Tulips will forever take me back to MD Anderson and sitting with my brother outside, talking privately about the inevitable, surrounded by huge planters full of riotous purple spring tulips.
And also to Nashville, where my sister and I took a road trip, one of our last youthful ones, to Jackson to visit our mother for the last good time, and then on to Nashville. I was still in college. I had a speech class wherein I had to recite a poem from memory upon our return home.
No offense to those people who like poetry (especially a couple of brilliant bloggers who hey guys ya know I love you but that doesn't mean I have to love everything you WRITE) but I just fucking hate it. So I chose something with subject matter I could enjoy on some level and spent ten days in a Lincoln Towncar driving to Tennessee and back with my sister and two of our guy friends. Smoking dope, randomly video taping anything that we saw, swilling rum, and loudly memorizing Poe's Annabelle Lee with liberal dramatic interpretation, we trolled across the South. My poetic recition was graced with the comic support of a plastic alligator head on a stick which I shit you not I still to this day have and could go pick up right now I know exactly where it is. One of those that has a trigger affair at the bottom of the stick which you squeeze and the plastic animal head at the top of the stick does something?
OK I've gotten WAY OFF TRACK.
Honestly folks, at this point I don't remember what the track was. Lets leave it at the alligator head and just go on with our lives, what say?
*As I've said so many times in my life, some of my genes I'm very happy for. To quote my neurologist: "Your sinuses look great for someone who lives in Houston!"Labels: personal urban drama, vacation |
