“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

— Tennessee Williams

There is such power in the gentle beauty of violets in Spring.  They burst to life out of nowhere, and soon spread their sweet color all through the lawn.  They sing out from under the apple tree, lurk in the corner by the garden shed, and dot the grass with color everywhere I look.

Again, this Spring, like so many other years, I wandered through the backyard as the first green began to show and looked for signs of my beloved violets.  It’s funny how their early green seems undetectable when their numbers are so great; but once again I remember thinking that maybe the violets had not survived the winter and they would live on only in my memory.

“Look at us, said the violets blooming at her feet, all last winter we slept in the seeming death but at the right time God awakened us, and here we are to comfort you.”

— Edward Payson Roe

Again, this Spring, like so many other years, I awoke one morning to a festival of purple polka dots and discovered that the frozen ground had been no match for the gentle strength of the violets.  As I led my little granddaughters to the spots where they grow and told them to “pick all you like,” I was taken back to the blessed days under the draping spirea hedge in my own backyard.  I would sit for timeless hours and pick fistfuls of violets as gifts for my mother.  ”Keep the stems long,” I advised the little ones, “so they can reach the water when you take them inside.”  ”These are for my Mom,” proclaimed Cheyenne, and I smiled all the way from my heart as I realized that violets just do that to a girl.  They open her heart and make her long to connect their beauty with the beauty she sees in the woman who loves her best.

This is the power of the gentle violet.  It opens the heart as it opens the ground and surprises us with its joy just at the time when we think it might not return.  I live in the valley and never have gone to see for myself, but I have no doubt whatsoever that these mighty, wild flowers could break the mountain rocks.  Their delicate beauty simply cannot be contained.