Before the groves and gardens sleep

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THE MORNING GLORY AND THE ROSE

What if, in spite of an untimely freeze, the morning glory opened early to the sun as she does customarily, never mind the chill at midnight, heedless of the wintry sting at five or six o’clock a.m.? Dawn catches her unfurling eagerly to drink the first fresh pink and orange beams, the sweetest in their purity. Some will think her reckless; she knows better, as do we.

Elsewhere in the garden there are blossoms reticent to show themselves for dread of frostbite, wrapped in all their fragile petal layers, holding tightly to them for protection. Nature, I suppose, possesses wisdom and experience beyond my own; she knows what she’s about.

The rose, perhaps, must cautiously keep watch, his vulnerable core intolerant of icy blasts late in the season. He would ask the April air to mitigate itself in ways felicitous to roses, thus assuredly to demonstrate his gorgeous geometrical array in safety come mid-May. All well and good, I say, for roses.

I would rather imitate the morning glory, braving every sort of wind to hear the stories each arrives relating from the corners of the earth by way of raucous shouting or of sibilance; besides, her beauty is the kind that shows to best advantage when in motion, nodding, tossing, spinning with her sisters in a feral dance that might caress the grass or reach aspiring to the sky.

At last, if I were she, happily would I draw back as shadows lengthen, sagging in the heaviness of afternoon. She makes a virtue of necessity, giving place to let the rose command attention in the quiet of a summer evening, when the wind’s remaining energy ascends in gentle currents to the canopy; it loves to tease the drowsy cottonwood and maple leaves before the groves and gardens sleep.

Then the morning glory -- blissfully exhausted and perhaps, if flowers are at all contemplative, a little pensive -- lets her bright blue dress go limp and drab and, in her self-imposed seclusion inconspicuous, collapses gratefully and rests, the better to embrace tomorrow for all the difference it makes.

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