flowers for youth

June. And cold. Yesterday I picked wild flowers quickly, white headed cow parsley then to break up the weed feel, pink faced bright ones (red campion perhaps), thniking as I tore at the stalks, breaking them, not always cleanly, sometimes yanking them out by the root, that the act of picking wild flowers in the morning should not be rushed. Being June the grass up from the beach is not only green but cheering and swaying with colour, albeit it mostly the white headed carrot family. When had I last picked flowers? The daffodils that I had filled the kitchen with were all dead. Once, some years ago I had this idea a writer should know the names of things so I scavenged the headgerows near my mother's cottage and came back with an armful of wild flowers. The next day the cat was dead. Reason of death unknown. I suspected some poisonous belladonna or some such killer. So I'm slow to bring in the wild flowers. We, the generation who have forgotten our floral healers and balsams and poisons. But my rushed pickings before jumping in the car and heading off to work were not bound for the kitchen table but the heads of fifteen year old boys.

An hour later I twist the wild flowers into crowns for their heads. The boys help. 'Bind them' I say, 'with elastic bands.' I watch their slender fingers take the red elastic and fumble to tie a bow. I stop myself from saying 'don't bother about a bow, just tie a knot' because there is something beautiful about the attempt, the effort to tie a bow. This small act is one of beauty. A garland of flowers asks it. They have not wilted - the flowers, nor the boys. I wrap them in white bed sheets and they are ancient Greeks. For moments some Gods of goodness and beauty bend close.