Rose and I are lying low in Salvisa, but we drive to Louisville once a week for grocery shopping at the Dirty Kroger in Clifton and for bloom binging in Cave Hill Cemetery, Cherokee Park and nearby Kentucky woodlands.
Photographing spring blooms takes a bit of the edge off social isolation. I love Kentucky in April. In fact, I am willing to take on anyone who thinks they have better early spring blooms than Kentucky.
I like my grocery options, also.
The Dirty Kroger’s on lower Brownsboro Road, despite a major rehab a few years back, has persisted with this name for decades. I don’t remember the store ever being dirty, literally, but grocery shopping with cheerless shoppers now feels like a dangerous and dirty obligation.
The frontline workers, on the other hand, have been helpful and pleasant. I am grateful to all shelf stockers, floor moppers and cashiers. Ditto for the good folks at Rainbow Blossom, and Lotsa Pasta. And I have taken advantage of the Wine Rack’s curbside pickups, including their recommendation of a mighty fine Spanish Tempranillo.
As COVID-19 spread, we began ordering Kroger groceries online for curbside pickup, also.
Bloom binging, however, has continued without precaution. My people are not into death worship, but we follow blooms wherever we can find them.
I have relatives at eternal rest in beautiful Cave Hill Cemetery, but I know little about these Bushes. The family plot filled up years ago. My grandmother knew where the family skeletons were. Her best stories would have been about the misfits. We had plenty. Nanny would not have pulled punches about any of them
Grace Williams Bush told funny stories, a talent cultivated by her storyteller father, while growing up on a ranch near Gettysburg, South Dakota. Nanny smiled and laughed often—easily and without restraint. She once confessed to my father, late in life, that she was oversexed. He didn’t press her for details.
I’ve been thinking of Nanny these past few weeks. She wanted nothing to do with a burial plot or headstone. There was to be no fuss upon her death. Nanny asked that her remains be cremated. Years before she died, she asked us to think of her, occasionally, when we saw a pretty cloud in the sky.
Nanny was nearly blind with cataracts in old age. Life became a blur. On Sunday visits with her after church, when I was growing up, we would all try to describe what she could not see.
I’ve dreamed of Nanny driving shotgun, around the farm, the park and the cemetery with us the past three weeks.
Rose and I brought spring beauties saucer magnolias, daffodils forsythias into clear focus for her.
I tried to trick Nanny with made-up blooms. In a field of daffodils, on the Salvisa farm, I told her we were passing a 300-foot tall tree, with hundreds of sky-blue blooms as big as dinner plates. “Nanny, the blooms smell like sweet sherry.” I knew that would get her attention.
“You’re making this up,” she said. Nanny paused and then asked politely, “May I please have a glass of sherry?”
The car filled with laughter.
Bloom Binging Without Precaution originally appeared on GardenRant on April 1, 2020.
The post Bloom Binging Without Precaution appeared first on GardenRant.
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