Sunday, March 25, 2012

Growing in our wash

Poppies?  And not the golden Arizona poppy that carpets the desert this time of year, my favorite alongside the lupine, its usual companion...  Where am I?  Arroyo Chico or the French countryside?  If I'm going to have an invasive species in my neighborhood wash, I'll take this one any day.

Dad just emailed saying they are ranunculus, but I don't know... this image and this one and this and also this one make me think poppies.  Look at the green closed heads drooping on the stems.  And I think the greenery is poppy-like.  But I can't find any info on the internet about people confusing the two.  And I could be wrong.

I remember riding on the train from the Paris airport to the Eiffel tower, where I was supposed to meet my friend Diana.  Out the window, I saw my first red poppies, and even in what I'm sure was a Paris suburbia, I felt I had been swept into a Monet.  I grew up in California and Arizona, where poppies are orange-gold, and fragile, spidery, momentary, even more ephemeral than those red flags of remembrance and passionate Rorschachs of impressionism that I saw outside that train window. 

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