Springtime

Here's some of that pretty-and-eerie post-storm orange light in the evening sky, the kind that makes everything look like it's lit from within.

That light always makes me think of my Grandma Marguerite, and of those early summers when I was young and very afraid of all storms, but especially the ones that threatened to turn into tornadoes (a common threat in Oklahoma), and of emerging from the cellar in her backyard into that light, after the sirens had subsided and the rain had stopped, and of looking at her roseate face while she talked about how beautiful everything looks after a storm.

Yes, I still have Christmas lights on my house.

I had nothing to do with the cultivation of any of these flowers. Just reaping what someone else has sown. These roses are in the backyard, and the irises are all in the front on either side of the driveway.

I have no idea why (probably because, as I mentioned before, I'm not the mother of any of this botanical splendor), but there are so many more colors this spring than there were last... last year, they were all the same shade of periwinkle, but now there are some with deep purple at the edges and white in the middle...

...some yellow, some white, some the color of peach flesh, and at least one that's almost the color of rust. I don't know, maybe it's normal. Is it, people who have irises and actually know a little something about them?

One other thing that made me think of my Grandma tonight:

I made pizza for dinner (with tomato sauce and mozzarella and chicken apple sausage), and after I stretched out the pizza dough and put in on the pan, there was some extra hanging over the edge. So I cut it off in strips and baked in on another pan, the way she used to do with extra pie crust. We would eat it with fresh strawberries and sugar and ice cream.

So now I really want some ice cream.