Someone Forgot to Tell the Violets…

“Someone forgot to tell the violets it’s not spring.”

That’s the text message I got from my older sister yesterday afternoon when I was out mowing the lawn, and she was out puttering in her garden.

If we were living 100 years ago, she might have used it as an opportunity to send me a postcard with a message on the side by the address that said something like, “I saw a violet blooming on October 24 and thought of you.”

Maybe it would have been a postcard like this one from my collection—my TINY collection—of postcards featuring violets on them.

It’s fun to read the messages people wrote on postcards a hundred-plus years ago. Sometimes it was just a sentence like “we arrived home safely after our wonderful visit.” Or maybe it started with “I hope this card reaches you in time…” That seems to have been a popular way to start a message on a postcard with birthday greetings.

But yesterday I didn’t get a postcard because today we send text messages with pictures to communicate simple messages. And because it’s all just 1’s and 0’s on a computer somewhere, the likelihood that a hundred years from now someone will see that message is zero. They won’t.

Hmmm… maybe my sister should have sent a postcard for posterity?

(Wow, Carol. That little text sure has you down a rabbit hole. Before you go pulling out all your old postcards to read those messages on them, which, like text messages, they probably didn’t intend for people to read a hundred years ago, why don’t you finish up this blog post? Even though it’s also just 1’s and 0’s on a computer somewhere?)

Yes, violets aren’t supposed to bloom in October.

But sometimes they do.

After I got my sisters’ text, I looked around briefly at my violets and didn’t see any blooms.

But I did find a Christmas Rose with a big fat flower bud on it.

Someone told the Christmas Rose it’s winter?

I hope not. I still need a lot more fall.

But with or without more fall, the good news is that fat bud will open soon and will keep flowering, so I’m pretty sure I’ll have a Christmas Rose for Christmas Day.

But the violet? My sister is right. Someone, and I suspect garden fairies, forgot to tell it that it isn’t spring.

I shall investigate…