On my way to work this morning, I saw the red clover peeping out all along the highway in patches here and there. It's a small thing, so trivial, but the first sighting of red clover makes my heart sing!
I remember clearly, the first spring after we had moved to Mississippi, the first time I saw red clover. I grew up with totally white clover, the kind little girls make "daisy chains" with. At school recess, we would gather in the yard and pick and string up piles of white clover. The scent of it; oh, such memories that brings back, of warm, humid days and green grass stains on skirts.
I did not know clover came in other colors! I recall asking my neighbor what all those red wild flowers were.....lush carpets of them all along the road, in the neutral ground between lanes and along the roadside. "Why, that's just clover," she said, laughing at my ignorance. I was bowled over.
Now, the red clover is a special signal to me of the passing of the year. Summer is just around the corner. There are patches of white flowers too, which I guess are like dandelions, though they don't quite resemble the ones I grew up with. And soon, the gentle hillsides along the road will be wearing patches of a lavendar, heather-like flower.
Red clover is here.....Mississippi spring is so wonderful, so magnificently colorful, a riot of nature's paintbrush, and the natives just think I'm a little crazy. They don't see it with the same eyes as I do.
Louisiana has its own natural beauty. The swamps near my home had cattails, lavender bulb plants whose name escapes me, yellow and white daisies and dandelions, Queen Anne's lace......but it seems to me I saw these most all the time. They didn't just suddenly appear, as if by magic, because the season had changed.
Maybe I notice such things more as an adult than I did as a child.
I just know the red clover made me happy this morning. Magic.....God's paintbrush all over the roadside, and people just don't notice it. What a shame.
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