Isn't this a lovely time of year? I just love spring, everything feels so fresh and new and clean. We hooked up our water outside for the first time yesterday so I could water my trees and bushes and flowers. Guess what I found? Peach blossoms and daffodils and hyacinths, spinach growing in my garden, and columbines in my flower bed. It was so exciting! I love living in the mountains where so many lovely things can grow, but spring was a wonderful time of year to live in the desert, too, as long as there was plenty of water to irrigate with.
Some of my earliest memories are of springtime in Mesa, Arizona. We lived in an old house on N. McDonald, a quaint old neighborhood in the center of Mesa. Our home was surrounded by big old shady trees and lush green grass. There is a picture in my mind of a big rock with numbers on it, it must have been a marker for our address, sitting in a patch of tall grass. We hid Easter eggs behind it, I think.
Every Sunday mom and dad would take my brothers and sister and I down to the LDS Temple on Main Street to walk around the grounds. They were always planted with the most wonderful springtime flowers: snapdragons, whose mouths opened when you squeezed their sides so you could stick your finger inside; stalks, whose fragrance filled the air with the most indescribably sweet smell; little purple and yellow pansies and other spring flowers, filling the beds with pink and yellow and orange and white and green. It was so lovely. Above everything else, there were hundreds of orange trees planted throughout the grounds. In the spring they would be covered in waxy white blossoms, giving off the most exquisite perfume imaginable!
In fact, Mesa was a town pretty much covered with citrus trees. Most homes had at least one orange, lemon, or grapefruit tree planted in it's yard. Ornamental orange trees lined many streets, and N. McDonald had a row of oranges planted right down the middle, with traffic going north or south on either side. It made a lovely dividing line, but also an obstacle course if you needed to drive through the middle of the trees. But then, who would ever do something like that? My brother.
Keith was just a year and a half older than me. He was my idol, and I tagged along behind him wherever he went. When I was a baby and Keith was only two, mom put us both in the car one day so she could run an errand. The car was parked along the side of our house, pointing out towards the street. After putting us in mom remembered something she needed in the house, so she ran inside. Somehow Keith fell, or crawled down, onto the gas pedal. I suppose he must have already tugged on the gear shift and pushed in the button to start the car, because we jerked forward and shot down the driveway, across the lane, up over the cement curb, across the grassy divide between the orange trees, back down onto the other lane, up over the curb across the street, over that sidewalk and yard, and smashed into the white walls of the women's club building on the other side of the street across from our house. A short trip, but how exciting! I actually don't remember any of it, but mom kept a clipping from the newspaper describing the wild adventures of the two year old reckless driver. Thank goodness no one was hurt!
No comments:
Post a Comment