In praise of myself and flowers

Yesterday I wrote about some small flowers.

Did you see it?

It was beautiful.

It was extraordinary.

It was magical!

It was the best thing written on the whole of the vast Internet for the day, aye in the whole of letters, in anything written anywhere for that day.

You might have seen it. 

Eleven or so people did. It swept across the Internet like a fire in a gas station run by people with Parkinson's disease. First one person saw it. Then later another person saw it. Someone started to read it but got distracted or tired because it was dozens of words long. A third person read it! They liked it. They told no one because why would they? And the fourth person didn't need to be told. It just showed up in their mailbox. So they read it. Then they thought... nothing.

And before you know it, eleven people had read it, so many I cannot even list all the incidents. Well I could, but it would take ten minutes I am opposed to wasting.

And then this tiny masterpiece of mine disappeared. Forever, almost. 

Do you want to go champion this tiny literary wonder and sell it to an unenlightened world? 

No, me neither. Let it go. Let it go forever. Let it never be thought of again if it must.

Do you know how many Snow Glory flowers bloomed three days ago in the Twin Cities? I don't. Did I see them all? They were on the hillsides and in the scruffy scraps of meadows among the tiny forests between houses. They were sprawled in the oversized yards of the houses on Crocus Hill, which is the name of a real neighborhood just East of here. They scattered along abandoned train tracks. They were anywhere they could be in the first burst of Spring here.

There were millions of them. Who saw them?

In their finest moment some were seen and some were not. I saw some and some I didn't. Did they care?

I don't know if they cared. They didn't write about it. They're flowers.

I just know that the first burst of Spring here was blown away by the last burst of Winter. It snowed for a day or two in the middle of April. Then, still cold, the snow slowly melted away, leaving the bedraggled flowers. 

I saw those flowers today again. They looked wet and heavy, like mosquitoes drowning in the rain. They tried to lift their heads up, but could not. Their very three-dimensional form seemed washed out until they looked like they were painted roughly in the mud.

I have never in my whole long life seen such tired flowers.

But they were still flowers. Flowers!

They knew what they had done.