Heart's Ease or Love-in-idleness

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After breakfast, as I walked back to the hotel, a speck of color caught mine eye. It was flotsam in a green sea. There at lawn's edge, stood a flower proudly sunning itself, haughty though small, in the humid, salty air that blows through Newport News. Flowers stun me, halt me in my tracks, and draw me close, especially the violets. I've spent hours combing hillsides for the delicate beauties. I prize their faint scent, turn it into mead of the most delicious purple hue. Deep in a cold Ohio winter, a bottle of the bubbly brew recalls the warm sunshine of spring.


This member of the violet family, Viola Tricolor, is a European native that is commonly planted as an ornamental here on the Continent. Sometimes it escapes cultivation, setting a tiny seed or two adrift on the wind to land underfoot, or perhaps to find a desert island, inhabited only by the native grasses, on which to start anew. It goes by many common names, including Heart's Ease and Love-in-idleness. Shakespeare fancied it to have the power to grant love. Struck by Cupid's arrow, drunk from the song of a mermaid, the flower swelled purple with love's woe. The juice of the herb, says Oberon to Puck, applied to the sleeping eyes makes a person fall in heedless love with the next living thing in sight, be it man, woman, or beast.

In mine eyes, the flower stirred up feelings of lust and love, and I sent it on to Susan via email. She is off tomorrow for her summer research in the San Juan Forest of Colorado, and I'm just a little sad to be shipwrecked in this forlorn hotel instead of by her side, but such is the power of love that it can overcome time and space to draw hearts together. In the next two months, as she studies Lincoln Sparrows in the high meadows, we'll continue our electronic flirtting wirelessly just as often as she can make it into town. In the meantime, I will continue the flower updates for the wide web to enjoy.

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