**
Forty days.
Six weeks, give or take.
Between the rising and the ascending,
between the emergence and the divergence,
between the wonder and the what-now,
Christ remained.
For forty days (six weeks, give or take),
Christ walked the earth again,
tying up the loosest ends,
cooking breakfast for His friends.
For forty days (six weeks, give or take),
Christ’s friends breathed His earthly air,
taking in His earthly prayers,
stretched again from earthly cares.
The bluebonnets have lasted past a month now.
I don’t know what day it was,
but sometime in March
the bluebonnets sprung
up from the ground
en masse.
An army of them,
delicate sturdy bottle brushes
rich and blue and deep,
rose from the rubble
and the dirt.
They spanned out across berms
and they filled up fields
and they scattered themselves across parks,
making someones ask,
“Can we even mow?”
Because they say there’s a law
against picking bluebonnets.
It isn’t written down,
it turns out,
but it’s followed.
So often,
it’s followed.
And doesn’t that make it more a law?
Weeks ago, now, the bluebonnets came,
and slowly, we responded,
telling our partners, “I saw them today,”
and looking on the map at Willow City
and scurrying with babies to submerge them
in the blueness.
We took pictures of our children
among the bluebonnets.
We told our gardener mothers they should
come down from the north again next spring.
For weeks now,
on the sides of roads,
the bluebonnets have been standing sentinel,
their clustered petals watching,
tilted ever so slightly
towards the sky.
They invite us,
bluebonnets do,
to stretch away from earthly cares.
Then, they die.
To bloom again next spring.
They say the bluebonnets are here for about six weeks.
Forty days,
give or take.
**
Oh! I like this—a lot!