Truth be told, I don’t recall what this is actually a picture of – looks like something pink, but nothing before or after it in my phone camera roll links to anything in this particular shade of pink. A mystery photo, from a time when there aren’t many mysteries left in the world.
I love it for that.
Keep your mystery, pink blob. We need the mystique.
This will be the last weekly blog recap of spring, as next Sunday brings us officially into summer. How we managed to arrive here so quickly is beyond my limited understanding – spring has flown by in many ways, yet it seems to contain a lifetime, a multitude, an entire world in itself. Here’s the last weekly recap for the spring season 2026 – may it be as magical for you as it was for me.
Madonna’s back, crown intact.
The pinnacle of the peony parade.
The biggest failure of this website.
A gratuitously shirtless Harry Styles post.
Snippet of a conversation with Skip.
Dazzlers of the Day included Sydney James Harcourt, Shoshana Bean, and Charlie Overbey.
“When kids are different, you just know. You can tell ~ adults can tell. And the quiet kids were never, well, you know, they just don’t fit in. And if you don’t fit in at the beginning, you never really fit in, ever, do you?”
Belonging.
It’s such a lovely word. A lovely sentiment.
Some of us spend our lifetimes searching for where we might belong.
Still, we search.
Still, we seek.
Still, we yearn to belong…
I find him in his reading chair
When he looks up and sees I’m there
He stands in wonder
He chokes up as he says my name
Explaining why he never came to me
I hug him
I tell him I’ve been busy too
So everything’s okay
He’s proud to see how strong I am
And then at last I hear him say
Spring enters its final weeks, and it’s already, and finally, feeling like summer. The seasons don’t always seem to know where they belong either. How could humans possibly find their place? Perhaps belonging has less to do with a place, and more to do with a feeling. Maybe the placement of belonging is a space we create in our minds – a land of shared sentiments, a world of deeper connection, a universe of love – all in our heads.
And when other joys have passed away
You will still be here to guide me
Tomorrow, just as true as yesterday
You will be here, you will stay
Always here beside me…
Tired of the push and pull that has been this spring – never deciding whether it wants to snow or burn up – I sink to the floor, lean back against the bed, and silently wait for the summer. A shirt of lilac lace holds my hand – the jeweled necklace my leash. The window air-conditioning unit rumbles and moans – on its last legs, but I’ll try to get one or two more summer seasons out of it. This attic room reminds me of summer. The desk needs to be cleaned off and de-cluttered. I should probably vacuum too, instead of just waiting for the next set of guests to force the matter.
The fiftieth spring of a man’s life should be something special.
I find every spring a little special.
Rain makes for a damn good song.
We finally got some badly-needed wet stuff the other night – even with this questionable spring, we are somehow already dry as a bone. The rain arrived at night, which is best for everyone and everything. Good sleeping weather, good rejuvenating moment for the garden and lawn, good way of getting the precipitation out of the way in the hopes of a sunnier day.
When I woke the next morning, the garden felt refreshed. Drops still stuck to some of the plants, though they would burn off quickly enough. The sedum seen here (my new favorite foliage plant with its gray leaves with hints of burgundy) held onto its wet carriage. Rain storms don’t always stick around, even when you need the rain. Here are a few rain songs to help us make our peace with the gray days as they come.
ME: Turn out my car needs four new brakes. How many brakes does a car even have?
SKIP: Uhh, four.
ME: Oh my God, then that’s all of them!
Last year marked the tenth anniversary of our BroSox Adventures, so Skip and I went all out with an extra-long weekend documented here and here. This year we are getting back to basics – no extravagant theme or agenda, no months of planning – just me and my good friend taking in a Red Sox game (no matter how badly they might suck right now – the Fenway franks are still the best anywhere).
Today we are headed back to Boston for our 11th year of this cherished tradition. Check out the links below to see how far we’ve come.
The BroSox Adventures
BroSox Adventure 2015: Part One, Part Two and Part Three.
BroSox Adventure 2016: Preamble, Part One and Part Two.
BroSox Adventure 2017: Part One and Part Two.
BroSox Adventure 2019: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.
BroSox Adventure 2020: Canceled, like everything that year, due to COVID.
BroSox Adventure 2021: Part One and Part Two.
BroSox Adventures 2024: Part One and Part Two.
BroSox Adventures 2025: Part One and Part Two.
And some plants scream and stomp and smash the senses until they gain notice.
This plant is one of the latter, thanks to its flaming florals and fiery foliage.
It’s a powerful combination, proving the old adage that more is so much more.
Whenever I shrink away from doing something that scares me, or wearing something I think might be too much, I think of a plant like this, and I feel empowered, and remember that adage.
It’s one of the best weeks in the garden, as most of our peonies are in full bloom. We usually miss part of the show because we’re typically in Maine when they start, but things are so late this year we got to see every bloom as they opened – a gift and a bit of a silver-lining moment for the delay in good weather.
This variety is probably the most color-saturated and vibrant of our collection, though it lacks in that heavy heavenly peony fragrance – one of nature’s trade-offs I suppose: to get something, you have to give something.
Pink dahlias front and backend this weekly blog recap, and if you’ve missed any of the posts for the past week this is your chance to make up for that, and you should, because they’re all so pretty at this time of the year. (It’s also been a roller coaster of a week, and some of that insanity bled into these posts – enjoy!)
It began on this fucking day.
The passion of this flamboyant flower.
A mid-week memorializing of a Maine weekend began here.
And it concluded here.
A grandly gratuitous half-naked Ben Cohen post.
Forget-me-not Friday will not be a regular thing.
A trio of trillium posts began with this entry.
Part two of the trillium trio injected some pink into the petals.
The final entry of the trillium trio got things all wet.
These behind-the-scenes green-screen pics of Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man (and giving foot and stocking fetishists a field day) are just what this Sunday ordered.
On the last day I visited the only trillium patch I know, it was raining. Centuries after these two lads left a kiss on the lips of a trillium bloom, I sit on a bench sheltered by a silver maple tree, across a pathway beside the trilliums. Beneath my umbrella, the cadence of rain sounds like the drone of days and months and years – time marching across the graves and markers of those who came before.
The trilliums cry in the rain… or the trillium’s cry in the rain… and not much differentiation in the misery of either case.
Rain falls to match the mood – melancholy and resignation and regret that reaches back through the years. The trilliums look downtrodden, bowing their heads beneath their burdens. They’ve seen the many tales and travails of love, its tenderness and tenacity, the way it sometimes defies time and space – the way love is always worth the tears. They weep for the sheer beauty and rarity of love in a world so filled with everything but love. They weep from happiness.
For Robert Philen
by Reginald Shepherd
You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name
The trillium plays many roles in floral folklore. It follows the rule of threes – three leaves, three petals, three sepals. There’s an unconquerable primal aspect to the number three, and trilliums wield this property masterfully. While some have attributed a connection to the Catholic Holy Trinity, the trillium has also been celebrated as a symbol of bisexuality and sexual fluidity. With both male and female reproductive organs (stamen and pistil) technically the trillium flower could fairly be considered bisexual itself – but more recently it’s come to be viewed as a symbol of interconnectedness and connections beyond the strict historical boundaries societally imposed within a male/female binary prison.
The trillium offers another alternative – the idea of a love not bound by time or gender or distance. Which brings us back… centuries back… to a love that at the time dare not speak its name, on a lush lunch gathering just for two.
Two lads.
Two lads on a beautiful, ephemeral spring day – the kind of day you know will never last, so part of you wants to weep, and part of you doesn’t want to be there at all because you know it will never be like this again, and you’re certain you can’t handle the heartbreak of having sipped such loveliness only in order to never have it again, and part of you knows that to not taste of heaven won’t make hell any more bearable when he is gone, so you partake of it – the day, the spring, the lips of a lad who only just said he loved you.
Two lads… and time – a tricky trio, a throubling threesome, if you’ll indulge the wayward bending of words. Time is safely and ruinously their only witness – when the lads have grown old and forgetful, when age has erased the once-indelible grooves of memory – only time will remember them there, beside the trilliums – their laughter, their gaiety, their happiness – the way they slumped gratefully against the trunk of an oak tree, one nuzzling into the neck of the other and closing his eyes, one looking languidly into the distance, into the future, into the nodding heads of the trilliums.
Two lads – one younger, one older…
Two lads – one shorter, one taller…
Two lads – one light-haired, one dark-haired…
These two lads sat beneath an oak tree centuries ago – an oak tree that must have been in close proximity to a stream or brook or some bit of babbling water that made for easy conversation or none at all. It was so long ago that lads and oak tree are again part of the soft earth that once gave slight way beneath their collective weight on this beautiful spring day. The moss was cool and soft, and nearby a patch of trilliums was in full ephemeral bloom.
Some love survives centuries, cropping up generations later in the petals of a trillium. The tender spot of mossy ground where they once sat together, taking their lunch and laughing, resting from the high heat of the day, shifts and alters under the great bearing wall of time. Watching their ease and intimacy from a distant vantage point of modern-day existence still feels obscene – like we are intruding, even if they cannot see us, even if they are already gone.
What brings two young men to such a point? What connects one human being to another in a way that stills time? Maybe it was as simple as a shared lunch. Maybe it was as easy as the spring day. Maybe it was just that he was he, and he was he.
Who knows every single intricate step it took to reach the state in which they slip into each other’s thoughts so nimbly and easily, the seconds and minutes and hours spent learning and observing, or the specific cadence of expanding affection that led them to this late spring lunch they’re sharing with the trillium?
Love – true love – doesn’t operate or appear by design or planning, nor is it mere destiny or luck. It’s a confoundingly complex series of the smallest moments that eventually coalesce into something more – sometimes friendship, sometimes respect, sometimes basic tolerance – and sometimes, when the world decides to grant us awful humans a momentary reprieve of kindness – sometimes… love.
If you know me at all, you know I’m always gonna be that Mama Bear…
Putting my oxygen mask on first…
Not only because I hate the children, but because it’s the safest thing to do.
Be safe, people.
