A Deep River Year
June 4,  2014

June has come, with its long afternoons and the deepest green  of the year.   The warm, settled, summer days have yet to come, and the roses, usually in full bloom by now, are just beginning to break out of their tight buds.   And the hillside laurel, which by now usually decks the landscape as if a wedding were about to take place, is late this year, too.    But the iris and rhododendron are glorious, and here and there other surprises have begun to reveal themselves. 

Hidden at the edge of the terrace are lovely pink stalks of wood hyacinth, and the trillium has opened its secret blooms deep in the shade where no one would ever see it if they didn’t know where to look.   Today or tomorrow I will take a walk in Canfield Woods to see if I have missed the lady slippers where they come and go so quickly in a wet, shady grove just off a turn in the trail.   It is a challenge to catch these seasonal visitors at the moment they appear.  Wait too long and they are gone.     That is what happened, I think, to the jack-in-the-pulpit that grows near our back door.   Away for a long weekend, we returned to find little Jack limp and shriveled under his three-leaf cover.

I have always especially loved jack-in-the-pulpits.   I have vague memories of my grandmother, but one of the clearest is walking down the path behind her little house to look for the jack-in-the-pulpits in the shade.   She would lift the curving green leaf and smile as she pointed to little “Jack” peeking out from his shelter, almost as if we had found a friend who had once disappeared and now come back.    And we had. 

Jack-in-the-Pulpit

 Some treasures
Are shy visitors,
Hiding in shadows
Or peering at us
From their secret dwellings.
Busy at our important labors,
We lumber past
These gentle faces
That will not be with us long
And miss
Their tender blessing.

--Timothy Haut, June 4,  2014