"Floating Doilies"

A new friend recently told me about MaryJane Butters and loaned me Butter's book, MaryJane's Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook. I'm enjoying it one little bite at a time. It's really too tasty and too rich to devour all at once.

Yesterday I was sitting on the porch, feeling a little farmgirl, wearing overalls and pigtails. Fluffy and Cornelia were running in and out and around my legs. I came across a picture of cow parsnips accompanied by the phrase "floating doilies", and a crochet doily pattern from MaryJane's mother.

MaryJane writes: "When my husband, Nick, and I were featured in National Geographic in December 1995, they quoted me referring to roadside cow parsnips with the phrase 'floating doilies'. I call them that because they remind me of the doilies my mother used to make."

Now I've never seen a cow parsnip growing along the side of the road, but I immediately thought of my carrots.



This carrot has been growing in our tomato bed for the past two years. When it started to bolt earlier this spring, we decided to leave it be to see what it would become. My children beg to pick the carrot at least once a day, but they know the answer is "no".



No one leaves my garden without seeing my blooming carrot .

"I had no idea that carrots had flowers," I've heard from more than a few neighbors. I didn't know either until this year.



Had I known 11 years ago, I would have planted a bed of carrots the day I got engaged and carried carrot blooms down the aisle. A bouquet of "floating doilies". Perhaps I would have planted cilantro alongside my carrots just so I could have worn sprigs of coriander blooms and seeds in my hair on my wedding day.



That would have driven my husband wild - he loves all things cilantro. I would have been the ultimate farmgirl bride.

This post is dedicated to Sherry, aka Roving Girl. She posted a picture of a carrot that had bolted, and wondered what the bloom would look like. I told her I would show her mine.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how grateful I am to have found friends here in the blogosphere with whom I share so many interests. It is absolutely amazing that we can communicate through words and pictures alone. We have developed a shared language made up of posts and pixels, tags and comments.

The people we meet face to face see our physical bodies, our clothes, our gestures, hear the sound of our voice, but here, through reading each other's words and seeing what each of us sees through the lenses of our cameras, we get a glimpse of each other's souls.

You might not recognize me if we passed on the street, you wouldn't recognize my voice if I called you on the phone, but I believe that you really see and hear me here, and I just want to say Thank You.