Poppy Preserve

by Poppy
(Sausalito, California, USA)

My favorite annual flower is the California poppy. This was my parents' favorite, too, and they gave me its name!

Each spring as long as I can remember I have visited the Poppy preserves outside of Los Angeles. As a kid I'd fall asleep in the backseat of the car on the way, after surf songs and hot dogs and grape soda, then wake up in the middle of fields and fields of nothing but bright beautiful orange. The petals, the fuzzy stems, the ready to burst seed pods. I'd scramble out of the car and run in the poppies, run and run, then twirl and spin, until I fell down dizzy from the motion and lay looking up at the cornflower blue sky. All that contrast. The orange. The blue. The desert, the flowers jumping up seemingly out of no where.

Later, when I was living alone in an apartment in East Hollywood, two counties away from my parents, I'd make the drive to the poppy preserves in the spring anyway. The first time was with my friend Penny.

Penny and I worked at the same bookshop on Melrose Avenue. She drove a VW bug with no tail-lights or turn signals, and was trying to save up her money. The bug was painted pale green with big pink flowers all over it, so it wasn't easy to miss. But somehow the authorities looked the other way that day and let us slow brake and hand signal our way out of the smog and into the desert. Half way there we stopped at a gas station. Penny asked me if I'd drive the rest of the way. I said yes, and in ten minutes she was sleeping in the passenger seat, head back, the wind blowing her hair. She got to wake up, this time, in the middle of the poppies.

We ate our picnic and talked about the flowers, the hills, the sun and air and sky.

That was a long time ago. Penny and I lost touch, and I moved out of the area. I'm a northern girl now, and a mama. But this spring I'll be driving south, taking my own sweet little flower on a road trip to visit the poppies.