Grandiflora rose Apricot Nectar

HAPPY EASTER!

This is a favorite rose. The color is such a beautiful blend of yellows with palest reds that it is hard to imagine designing anything prettier. The rosebush is growing a little too close to the avocado tree, so I have to cut back the lower branches of that tree so it can get more sunlight. This year, many buds, and so it looks like we will get a good show. I thought it was a pretty choice for an Easter post, so I took this photo this afternoon with my what-did-I-ever-do-without-it iPhone. S and I spent a very quiet day, enlivened by a visit to a pancake house. Our nice waitress was the youthful-looking mother of nine children; she was about to finish her shift and was getting videos on her phone of her grandkids jumping on the tiny trampoline she gave them for Easter.


A Prayer in Spring


Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.

             by Robert Frost

I seem to remember that it was Frost who said that writing verse without meter and rhyme was like playing tennis without a net. This poem will satisfy every desire that one of my older grandsons has for poems that rhyme. (He kept suggesting that my poems could be much improved in that regard.) And here is an EASTER poem I found using Google Search. I thought Frost must have written one! Besides this poem has a bird!

Having said farewell to Munter and Kandinsky, tonight I started the first volume of his biography, Robert Frost; the early years 1874-1915, by Lawrance Thompson.  I have been more curious about Frost ever since I read about his years in England in the book about Edward Thomas. Actually I don't have time to read such a long book now, but what the heck!

Happy Easter to all!