One of my mother’s lifelong missions was to keep the general level of family conversation out of the gutter. When one of us began to stray into the earthier realms, she would invariably say, “let’s talk about the flowers that bloom in the spring.” That was our cue to shape up, and we rarely failed to take the hint.

In fact, it was good advice in more ways than one, because talking about flowers can be an exercise in discovering the wonders that lie just a scratch below the surface of the mundane. When I was in in my single digits, there was one day above all others that I loved coming home from school, and that was the day the daffodils came out. I would leave in the morning, and hundreds of daffodil buds, spaced around under the ancient beech trees in our front yard, would be tightly closed, but on this one day of days, I would wander the half mile or so home from the school bus, scuffing my saddle shoes and imagining myself singing on stage to millions, and find golden perfection under every tree. I would stay out there, sniffing and examining the blossoms, until my mother coaxed me inside and unfastened the hard-to-reach button at the back of my neck, so I could go up and change. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I resisted this moment, as if changing out of my school dress would somehow sever the thread of my beloved-entertainer fantasy.

However, once grounded in the reality of the farm’s micro-universe, I was free to savor the here and now, in the form of a cornucopia of flowers. Here I will mention some, but please know that I have an incomplete recollection as to what season of the year these different flowers made their appearance, so I may have the fall flowers mentally juxta-posed with the spring ones, or some such botanical heresy.

Of course, I do recall that the crocuses were the first ones to appear in the spring, often tunneling up through the February snow to take a triumphant look around. And I know the ‘mums came in the fall; it seems to my shifting memory palette that they were the colors of fall, golden and bronze and red.

What else? Hollyhocks, with their bell-shaped petals, easily morphed into ladies in ball dresses. Snap dragons were fun because you could get them to gently bite you. Columbine, quietly climbing the pasture fence, was delicate to the point of ethereal, and honeysuckle disguised its ability to kill a young tree by broadcasting a bewitching scent and offering a tiny drop of nectar to one who knew how to find it.

I guess one could consider the flower as the baroque stage of a plant’s life cycle. Bright colors, fancy dresses, dazzling scents and shapes, shot through with a foreshadowing of immanent and catastrophic decay. The next stage would be the actual withering, followed by a pared-down, brand new start to life. Perhaps it is true that nothing ever really ends.