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That sweet smell
May. 3rd, 2006 09:29 pmCherry blossom season is ending. The recent winds have brought the flowers down in flurries and gathered the petals in banks and dry puddles. The sun have baked the dead flowers until they are brown, and dozens or hundreds of feet have crushed them into a fine powder in places. Vancouver smells sweetly of decaying flowers.
Decaying is defined by its synonyms: decomposing, wasting away, rotting. It is a prettier word, though, appropriate to the remains of flowers.
Daisies die beautifully. Their petals get a brown trim and twist and go limp, but they are still pretty flowers. Daffodils have ugly deaths. Their proud crowns shrivel away, leaving plain trumpets, strange and unbalanced.
"De", a small syllable of negativity. You are denounced, denied, declined. "Decaying" is descended from the Latin word for fall, cado. I suppose it means falling, as in from a great height, but I wonder at its connection to fall, autumn, often thought of as the season of decomposition.
In nature, autumn is the time of planting. While we think of harvesting and of putting our gardens to bed, the falling and rotting fruit plant the seeds for the next generation. Spring, while we plant our new gardens, is harvest time for nature. The flowers die and decay all around us as we celebrate the sun and the freshness of the year.
We are surrounded by the sweet smell of the deaths of the cherry blossoms.
Decaying is defined by its synonyms: decomposing, wasting away, rotting. It is a prettier word, though, appropriate to the remains of flowers.
Daisies die beautifully. Their petals get a brown trim and twist and go limp, but they are still pretty flowers. Daffodils have ugly deaths. Their proud crowns shrivel away, leaving plain trumpets, strange and unbalanced.
"De", a small syllable of negativity. You are denounced, denied, declined. "Decaying" is descended from the Latin word for fall, cado. I suppose it means falling, as in from a great height, but I wonder at its connection to fall, autumn, often thought of as the season of decomposition.
In nature, autumn is the time of planting. While we think of harvesting and of putting our gardens to bed, the falling and rotting fruit plant the seeds for the next generation. Spring, while we plant our new gardens, is harvest time for nature. The flowers die and decay all around us as we celebrate the sun and the freshness of the year.
We are surrounded by the sweet smell of the deaths of the cherry blossoms.
