It happened many times, and it
always happened just in that corner of the old garden.
When it was going to happen, the dance in your feet took you there
without your doing anything about it. You danced through the
flower garden and the vegetable garden till you came to the row of
currant bushes, and then you danced down it.
Fist came the black currants with their strong wild smell. Then
came the red currants hanging in bright tart clusters. On the
very last bush in the row the currants were white. The white
currants ripened first. The riper they got, the clearer they
grew, till you could almost see right through them. You could see
the tiny veins in their skins and the seeds and the juice. Each
currant hung there like an almost-told secret.
Oh! you thought, if the currants were just a wee bit clearer, then
perhaps you could see them living inside.
The white currant bush was the finish of the garden, and after it was a
little spare place before you came to the fence. Nobody ever came
there except to dump garden rubbish.
Bursting higgledy-piggledy up through the rubbish everywhere, grew a
half-wild mauvy-pink flower. The leaves and the blossoms
were not much to look at, because it poured every drop of its glory
into its smell. When you went there the colour and the smell took
you and wrapped you up in themselves.
The smell called the bees and the butterflies from ever so far.
The white butterflies liked it best; there were millions of them
flickering among the pink flowers, and the hum of the bees never
stopped.
The sun dazzled the butterflies' wings and called the smell out of the
flowers. Everything trembled. When you went in among the
mauvy-pink flowers and the butterflies you began to tremble too; you
seemed to become a part of it -- and then what do you think
happened? Somebody else was there too. He was on a a white
horse and he had brought another white horse for me.
We flew round and round in and out among the mauvy-pink blossoms, on
the white horses. I never saw the boy; he was there and I knew
his name, but who gave it to him or where he came from I did not
know. He was different from other boys, you did not have to see
him, that was why I liked him so. I never saw the horses either,
but I knew that they were there and that they were white.
In and out, round and round we went. Some of the pink flowers
were above our heads with bits of blue sky peeping through, and below
us was a mass of pink. None of the flowers seemed quite joined to
the earth -- you only saw their tops, not where they went into the
earth.
Everything was going so fast -- the butterflies' wings, the pink
flowers, the hum and the smell, that they stopped being four things and
became one most lovely thing, and the little boy and the white horses
and I were in the middle of it, like the seeds that you saw dimly
inside the white currants. In fact, the beautiful thing was like
the white currants, like a big splendid secret getting clearer and
clearer every moment -- just a second more and --------.
"Come and gather the white currants," a grown-up voice called from the
vegetable garden.
The most beautiful thing fell apart. The bees and the butterflies
and the mauvy-pink flowers and the smell, stopped being one and sat
down in their own four places. The boy and the horses were gone.
The grown-up was picking beans. I took the glass dish.
"If we left the white currants, wouldn't they ripen a little
more? Wouldn't they get -- clearer?"
"No, they would shrivel."
"Oh!"
Then I asked, "What is the name of that mauvy-pink flower?"
"Rocket."
"Rocket?"
"Yes -- the same as fireworks."
Rockets! Beautiful things that tear up into the air and burst!
___________________________
-- Emily Carr, 1942
from The Book of Small
retail price - $9.95
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current as of 15 March 2007