sweetgum

Saturday is when I do the weekly floral innkaup, but I have had a lie-in and risen too late to buy roses. That is as well. A good lie-in beats roses in my book. And when I do make it to the store (for Pinot Grigio and bread, not roses) there is a tumult of flowering everything there, and I am repelled by the excess of reds and pinks.

On the way back up the hill, I admire the spiny sweetgum seed pods (Liquidambar styraciflua) that have piled up against the curb in the bend of the road. I have always liked them, their little split spines like bird-beaks and their lightness. I recall being eleven or so and picking one up on a field trip, holding it in my palm and looking at it as the boys walking behind me, not destined to become great wits, made a tendentious claim to precocious puberty through a kind of training-wheels version of sexual harrassment: "Be careful not to get pricked ... huh huh ... don't get pricked."

I may forgo flowers entirely this week and go back out to the street for handfulls of sweetgum pods, set them on the table in a glass bowl.