Stealing Beauty

I was a child of five: dungareed, frog-small, sun- dappled by the dandelion clock of summer, when I gifted my mother with an Oz-ian bouquet; a tumult of dahlias— scarlet, cerise, sizzling fuchsia, stolen from a neighbor’s pampered bed, dirt still clinging to the nested roots, dropping smuts and blots of soil, even the soft […]