LOOKING FOR MAYFLOWERS

Hello Neighbor. Glad you stopped by.

Well winter has come and gone and the weather is warming up.  The deep snow is disappearing and soon will be gone and we will be able to go walking in the woods again.

Every spring after the snow has melted, my Dad would start taking walks in the woods. He is looking for the places where the Mayflowers grow.  They are scarce and one has to search and search in special places to find the tiny little flowers. They grow close to the ground and are had to find. Dad would keep going out to look to see if he can find a few little blossoms to make a small bouquet to bring home for my Mom. This is something that I remember him doing every spring.  Mayflowers have a beautiful delicate smell.  They always were a special  treat, not just because they were so scarce, but because it took time to search and search for the areas where they would grow.  You would have to remember the places from year to year so you would know where to look the next spring.

There were other special flowers that I remember my sister, Mary, and I used to go looking for. Another flower that was really a special treat to come upon was a Lady Slipper.  We didn't usually find them very often but it was a real treat when we did.  Another unusual flower that we might come across was called a "jack-in-the -pulpit".  It was a green plant that had an unusual shape to its flower. There would be a little cap that lifted up and inside was a brown stem. I guess it made one think of a preacher standing at his pulpit.  I guess that is how it got its name.  There was another flower Mary and I used to find in the woods down behind our house.  We would climb under a wire and just have a great time roaming around, looking to see what we could find.  There was a small brook that wound its way through the woods until it reached the highway and passed under the bridge and into Berry's Pond.  I think these flowers were called "sweet trillium". Most of the time the ones we found had three purple leaves and had a bad smell. We called them "stinking Benjamin's". If we were lucky we would find some with white leaves. These were pretty and didn't have much aroma not like the purple ones.

One of my favorites were the checker berries.  These small plants grew in certain places like the Mayflowers and we had to search for them.  After they blossomed, little tiny berries came out and we would eat them.  I think that the flower catalogs called them wintergreen.  When the new little leaves would appear we would chew them. So many neat things we found in our woods.  What lucky kids we were to have so many acres for our playground.

Mom had her favorite too. She loved looking for the field strawberries and she would pick and pick until she had enough for all of us to enjoy.  There were just certain fields and places they like to grow so it was quite a lot of work to find enough to make a dessert. So the farm supplied us with many different things.

Stop by again sometime and we will have another chat.