The splendor of rich green grasses and the azure sky take us far enough away from the everyday world to allow us to listen to our own heart and soul.
There is an inner music that's nice to listen to as it gurgles and bubbles like the brook just beyond us.
The sun is ever so soft on the hay-scented fern as great numbers of swallowtails enjoy this late Spring day.
Blossoming
is everywhere in the overlapping of Spring into Summer. Orange and yellow paintbrush pop
out of the grassy fields hand in hand with ox-eye daisies and buttercups. Cinquefoil mix
with wild strawberry, wild lavender-pink geraniums with yellow trefoil, tall prickly
brambles of white blackberry blossoms mingle with clumps and ribbons of dames rocket
pastels, all exhaled from the soft underside of the rainbow to decorate this magnificent
Appalachian Mountain Country land.
Reigning over the full maturity of Spring and the onset of Summer is the lovely Laurel Lady of the Mountains.
Tree top skylights allow the bright June sunshine in to sparkle sun drops off her upside-down parasol of pink and white beauty. She shines out from her delicate fern background like the precious jewel of the Universe she commands.
The lovely Laurel Lady and her Rhododendron mate enter the scene as the royal rulers of an Appalachian Mountain Country Summer.
Copyright © 1988, 1999 Barbara A. Smith and John G. Hipps. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published June 15, 1988 in the Free-Press Courier, Westfield, Pennsylvania.