Friendly Fire

Sunset is not just a time of day. It's an atmosphere, a quick-to-fade, precious few moments of light, in which the world is not itself. Very occasionally (given Crystal's scheduling proclivities), I'm actually home in the evenings, and some of those evenings, I happen to look out the bay window in the dining room to espy the back yard when it is brighter around the edges. And what always catches my eye is the poppies.

Last summer, my sister got married, and as she was exploring possibilities of flowers and colors, she thought at one point that she wanted poppies. So she ordered a pound of seeds from some supplier and asked Mother to plant them. Mother, happy to oblige, planted a long swath of seeds at the end of the cultivated portion of the garden, and they bloomed in good time, showing their flaming red faces and black hearts with equal openness. And this year, we've had the delight of their presence again.

Imagine... All is green, from the pale bright of the new mown lawn to the shadow and shift of the walnut tree to the dark depths of the corn stalks, already waist high in their army straight lines in the field. Beyond the field, a mysterious few pines, darkest of all against the white sky of sunset. And planted firmly in the middle of a world of gold-washed green: poppies. A chorus of redheads, all cheerfully, defiantly not green.

I particularly like them because they aren't beautiful. Perhaps these are just annuals that weren't meant to see another year, the leftover seeds that didn't make it last year, but decided that the arcane perfection of soil and sun were the cue for their entrance into the world. But they are a ragtag bunch. Some are bleached white around the edges or straight through to the center, faded like my grandfather's eyes when he grew old. Some are torn or wilted with rough and ugly edges. Some have lost petals, gaps in their smiling teeth that will only grow larger with the passage of time. And yet, despite their individual ugliness, they are beautiful en masse. In fact, I picked the only perfect one I found (and it was perfect, not a flaw from petal to pistil) because it made such a smug contrast to its imperfect brethren that it disturbed the poppy groove. A flower like that deserves to die.

They are a band of misfits, none too pretty in and of themselves, but glorified by their community, by their unapologetic flaming red, by their unlikely but true complement to the green around them. They are battle-scarred and glorious, a worthy patch of wildflowers that light up my evening when the sunset glow turns them into a hundred tongues of fire.