More Wildflowers

Passion Flowers, Passion Fruit.

We called them maypops when we were children.
The ripe fruit exploded with a sharp pop when crushed
underfoot. We'd eat some and leave the rest mangled
along the roadside, for we usually found them on ditch
banks, and there wasn't a lot inside to eat, just some
gelatinous matter with a lot of seeds.

It wasn't until I was grown that I heard them called
passion fruit, a name evocative of lust in far-off
tropical places.

Perhaps the cultivated ones have more edible material
and fewer seeds, but it would be hard to regard them
as exotic when farmers in the south have cursed them
as weeds between the corn rows. Their passion was
for getting rid of the vines before they wrapped tightly
around the young stalks.

But the passion was that of Christ on the cross, for just
as the cross is seen in dogwood blossoms, complete
with a brown smudge like dried blood at the tip of each
petal, so the inner circle of tiny, upright florets of the
passion flower are said to resemble the crown of thorns.

They are growing at the edge of my yard on the ditch bank
that borders the road. The grass in that area is long and
unkempt, for I won't mow it, the flowers too beautiful
to destroy.

I never realized how beautiful they are when I was a child.
Then they were only a signal to show me where I might
find the little round fruit that I could stomp and shatter
along the roadside.