They Have White Stellate Blossoms
© John Ward

“They’re not crocuses,” says Anne. She’s very argumentative. It’s her German and Irish roots.

“Then what are they?” I ask. It’s spring and they dot the lawns and boulevards, lots of them, but each standing separately, away from each other. They’re shy.

“They’re wildflowers,” she says. It’s true, they planted themselves, didn’t expect humans to feed and water them, made do with what nature provided.

“Just because they’re wild doesn’t mean they don’t belong to a legitimate family. All flowers were wild once. Domestication and selective breeding isn’t what gives them names,” I say.

“What gives them names?” she asks.

“Adam named them. It’s in the Bible.” It has to be. Everything is in the Bible, and its opposite is, too.

“Which book of the Bible? Genesis?” She wants to pin me down with facts. She’s probably right though. That’s the book where everything was created. But then it evolved. In the beginning were the first flowers, the flowers from Plato’s cave, the archetypes. They looked like the daisies children draw, simple, symbolic.

“The one by Mark Twain,” I say.

“Mark Twain didn’t write a book of the Bible,” she says.

“Maybe not, but he wrote about it. We’ll look it up. You’ll see.” I probably won’t be able to find the Twain book. Our library is a catacomb of confusion, with books piled every which way. Some are standing, spines straight, in military rows. Others are lying down, overlapping each other like the sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf. Fortunately, I have at least four Bibles.

“In the Bible?”

“No, in the wildflower book. We’ll look under crocuses.”

“They’re not listed by family,” she says. “They’re listed by the color of the blossom.”

“We’ll look under white blossoms then. We’ll find they are crocuses.” I know they are color-coded, but there’s probably an index.

“Just because they look like crocuses to you, doesn’t mean they’re crocuses. They don’t look like crocuses to me.”

Lord knows what they look like to her. We can only hope that when we both look at something we see the same thing, that red is the same red and white is the same white.

“It’s not just how they look. It’s how they behave, too,” I say.

“Oh, you’re an expert on plant behavior now. What’s that called, Psychobotany?” she asks. She thinks that next I’ll play music to the tomatoes and put electrodes on them to measure their reaction to classical, pop and rock and roll.

“Well, they all pop up at the same time, just like crocuses. Isn’t that behavior?” I ask.

“You could call it that, but I don’t think it’s a branch of psychology,” she says.

“I didn’t say that. You did,” I say.

“I want to get a picture of them so we can match them exactly to the picture in the guidebook,” she says.

While she focuses on the one in front of her, another pops up off to her left. I don’t tell her, because then I would have been wrong about them all popping up at the same time. I have to keep distracting her on the way home by pointing at birds in the trees, because the little white flowers start popping up everywhere. Maybe they aren’t crocuses at all.