Sometime around 1947 new neighbors moved in the house behind ours in Portland, Oregon. They were from Kansas and we had never met anyone from Kansas, but maybe that is why I have a soft spot for Kansas and her people. The Lyons family were just so nice; Elmer and Lucille and their daughter Charlotte who was the same age as my sister. I think that Charlotte and Ellamarie were joined at the hip from that day on. Elmer loved to tell the story of when they were moving their furniture in and found this little pigtailed girl on the porch. "Do you have a little girl I can play with?" Charlotte was too old for me and by the time they had another little girl I was too old for her.
I have such good memories of the Lyons family and one of them is Lucille's very Midwest garden with a row of peonies along the fence we shared. I don't know that I had ever seen them before, but I decided that they only came from Kansas. Of course, I found out they grow all over the place (but not in Placentia - too dry, too hot) and every time I see one I think of Lucille in her house dress and apron, out working in her garden. If I see cut peonies for sale in the spring I always buy a few in her memory.
I will try to keep up with posting on my blog, but if I miss a day or two, don't worry, I'll be back!
1 comment:
Kansas was where I learned to love peonies, too. We could grow glorious clumps of them because of the heat and sun. Here in Portland, it's harder -- you have to have good sun or the stems get long and lanky and the blossoms fall flat long before they should. There are some that are scented -- "fiesta" I think is one of them. We had a "hedge" of them that lined the driveway and our street was just a couple of blocks from the elementary school. The challenge was to be in full sight of the kids walking home from school when the buds were just at that great juicy ripe stage that is great for staging a good slinging match. There were a couple of years when I lost a lot of peonies that ended up rolling as buds down the sidewalks of Emporia.
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