A number of years ago I took my grandkids to see The Nutcracker Ballet at a local community theater. It is, of course, a classic, performed mostly at Christmas. I have seen it many times before, in fact, when I was child I was a dancing flower in a local performance.

Did you know there were words to the music of “Waltz of the Flowers”? I can never quite remember the lyrics and get them all mixed up. There are numerous versions.  The one I was taught, was the one by Fred Waring, a popular television band leader in former times.

I’m not sure what kind of flower I was supposed to be, a morning glory, I guess. My costume was blue and green. I hated it. The green was supposed represent the stem. My tutu was blue. I wanted to be a pink flower, like a rose. Actually, I wanted to be a white snowflake like my little friend Johnnie who was in the “Dance of the Snowflakes.” But here I was an ugly blue wall flower.

I did not, of course, actually know how to dance. I merely whirled, swirled, and pranced with the other kids in some sort of choreography worked out by adults who supposedly were wise in the ways of dance. We didn’t know this and thought we were actually dancing, in spite of the ugly costumes.

I’m surprised that I like flowers and didn’t grow up warped from the ballet version. Nowadays, I plant flowers, and some of them succeed and some don’t. I seldom plant annuals any more as the perennials have taken over the flower beds. It is probably just as well as digging in dirt does not appeal to me any more than a morning glory costume.

I once had climbing roses all around my back yard. Roses are a lot of work. You have to fertilize, spray, trim and mulch. Even then, they will die back in winter and go wild. So the roses of the world may be more beautiful, but they are no better in the end than the morning glories.

I decided that morning glories might be easier to grow than roses. They are. The first year the blue morning glories were beautiful and greeted me at the back door each day in glorious bloom. The next year wild ones sprang from the seed and I fought morning glory vines in the garden for years afterwards.

I now have several other aggressive flowers that remind me of the wild nature of flowers. Black-eyed Susan’s are bright, yellow flowers from the daisy family. They would happily take over my entire backyard. However, they have to fight for it with the pink primrose, another pretty, but highly invasive flower that has jumped the garden wall and gone wild. So, my flowers are not exactly waltzing these days. It is more like the catfight of flowers.

This morning I woke up and came in the kitchen to find it filled with large poinsettias. I rubbed my eyes. It seems my son went to the hardware store and ran into a special on poinsettia plants. They were so cheap he could not resist buying a half-dozen. I have placed them all over the house. So far, they are well behaved and have remained in the foil-wrapped pots where they belong. I hope they can be trusted.

Copyright 2013 Sheila Moss