Simply Plucking

There was no contest for this week's simple pleasure. It's one as faithful as those seasons that I yakked about yesterday and something that I look forward to every year.

You see,  it's jonquil season on the country commute.

I explained my affection for the quirky yellow flower last year at this time, but since very few friends were around here then, I thought I would copy the applicable portion of the explanation again.  To those who have already read it, my apologies.

We join this yakabout already in progress...

When I met the man of the house all those years ago, we were both in college and living on ramen noodle budgets.  Since I was child number 4 of 4, and he was number 4 of 5, neither one of us was enjoying the limousine lifestyle.

In fact, there wasn't a set of wheels between us. Our dates were limited to those places within walking distance and usually involved anything that we could do for free.

So every afternoon, weather permitting, we would take a walk.

And we ( that would be mostly I ) would talk. I would yakkity yak across the campus and through the Athens side roads. (The man should probably wear a button of full disclosure that he knew exactly what he was getting when he married me…)

One afternoon, in the spring of our relationship, I noticed a patch of jonquils bursting into bloom. I was delighted. He called them weeds and said he wasn't at all fond of a jonquil, but then he reached down and plucked up a yellow weed bouquet just for me. 

And that's how the whole thing started.

In the months that followed, he helped himself to a variety of plucked bouquets, most of which were pilfered from random gardens along our talking route. While I talked, he did flower surveillance and a commando raid on some unsuspecting blossom.

It was our first adventure.

Of course when the Duchess heard about the Great Plucking Adventure, she nearly fainted.

That is STEALING, Deb-rah!

It was? Seriously, we never considered that gardeners would mind a random pluck or two in the interest of true love. I had always thought of flower lovers as the ultimate romantics.

Well, either due to guilt... or fear that there was an APB out for the phantom Romeo of Milledge Avenue… or probably because the newness of the relationship wore off… he eventually stopped the serial petal plucking.

But to this day, when I see a patch of jonquils burst forth in the early spring, I remember those walks and the skinny boy who used to pluck me flowers when he couldn't afford to take me to dinner.

And I pluck myself a bouquet...

Or two...

and it makes me smile.

 Plucking up a memory is this week's simple pleasure.

*****

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