blueberries and bluebells

so pretty. see how the blueberry lady's dress matches her berries?
bigger over here.

(so hot over here. the clothes i washed this morning are drying {or have already dried} hanging inside the house, not even in the light. foof!)

here's one of the blueberry pages from a story i wrote/painted many years ago.

since bluebells are also on that page, i thought i'd quote a passage about bluebells that i just read in wendell berry's the art of the commonplace: the agrarian essays. the first essay, "a native hill," is, among other things, a poetic tribute to berry's home. here just part of the blueberry passage.

One early morning last spring, I came and found the woods floor strewn with bluebells. In the cool sunlight and the lacy shadows of the spring woods the blueness of those flowers, their elegant shape, their delicate fresh scent kept me standing and looking. I found a delight in them that I cannot describe and that I will never forget. Though I had been familiar for years with most of the spring woods flowers, I had never seen these and had not known they were here. Looking at them, I felt a strange loss and sorrow that I had never seen them before. But I was also exultant that I saw them now—that they were here.

For me, in the thought of them will always be the sense of the joyful surprise with which I found them—the sense that came suddenly to me then that the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know.

his essays make me reread and think. they are written beautifully and are often somehow both complex and simple. (this particular quote doesn't really reflect the complexity, but i liked the description of his bluebell delight.)