Buttercups and Bluebirds

We had a small garden patch behind our house on East 10th Street in Brooklyn. When I was little, there were empty lots behind the houses on our side of the street. In the late 1950s when the lots went up for sale, my Dad went from house to house on our street trying to enlist the home owners to go in with him to buy the lots; to protect the properties. And the environment. The lots were like a park back then with trees and wild flowers. Our private little wilderness. No one would go along with my Dad and he couldn't afford it himself. So the lots became used car lots. Enough said.

We had lots of floral weeds where ever the grass grew in Brooklyn. The most populous were the Buttercups. Not like Dandelions; Buttercups were tiny and awfully sweet. We had a small front yard, and never thought of the Buttercups as unwelcome weeds. Suburban homeowners would be appalled. I thought of these flowers today walking past the large lawns in Beverly, MA where I'm living. There was a blanket of yellow across one of the green lawns. I couldn't trespass to see if they were Buttercups. I figured they couldn't be. I haven't seen any in probably 40 years.

Also among the missing in the world of nature as I knew it, are the Bluebirds. They were the birds we grew up with; frequent visitors to our garden and the berry bushes in the lots behind the houses. I'm delighted when the red birds arrive in the summer; and of course the robins. But Bluebirds are scarce where I'm living. There's actually a society that I've recently discovered that exists to re-populate the Bluebirds. I am thinking about buying the special bird house and bird feeder designed for the Bluebirds. I don't know if I can go so far as to purchase meal worms. I have to think about that one.

There was a children's book that I owned once-upon-a-time. It is called The Bluebird and it's a magical story from the play by Maeterlinck. It was a film with Shirley Temple in 1940; an animated film in 1970; and a not-very-good film with Elizabeth Taylor in 1976. I've never seen a stage production of the original play. The book was charming; I can't recall what happened to my copy. Time, I guess, can be blamed for its disappearance.

Somehow, a walk on a sunny Sunday passed houses and lawns and sand and sea sets one's mind spinning backwards. I haven't thought of Buttercups in the longest time. I do think about Bluebirds each Spring when they don't appear in my current patch of garden. Or the books. I suppose if I let myself get swept up in this memory game, I'd hear the sounds of the lots behind our house. And the voices of my playmates laughing and calling at play in those lots. And the next thing I'd know, I'd be hearing that familiar voice calling me home to supper.

Who'd have thought that a patch of yellow flowers could accomplish all of that?