The "Dogwood Festival"

We have a glorious white dogwood in our back yard. I used to cut big branches stuffed full of velvety petals and fill a large cut crystal vase for the dining room until I realized after 2 years that the ritual brought with it two weeks of severe allergies and a horrendous cough. Now on beautiful days like today I'll get close enough with my camera to look, but never smell, and each morning I stand in our second-floor sunroom and look down on God's little backyard masterpiece. I think on days like this, I would like to have a Dogwood Festival.
The Dogwood Festival would only be announced a few days ahead of time to assure the arrival of the full blossoms and a sailor blue sky. We would serve mint tea with dogwood shaped sugar cubes and cucumber sandwiches cut like flowers and dilled potato salad with radishes and baby asparagus. There would be fresh scallions with sea salt and crackers with havarti cheese and just a dollop of raspberry jam. There would be a little Wendell August Forge pewter dogwood tray with homemade buttermints and sour cream~orange frosted cookies.
We would eat at a picnic table under the tree and play tag and badminton because the yard is so small, and after a round or four we would have to go get our heavy sweatshirts to chase away the chill in the air. We would light a fire and tell stories of our adventures in the woods and along the streams and what we would find when we would venture out on a spring day when the smell of the earth would call us. Toadstools and salmanders and moss-covered stones in the coldest streams that we used to dip our hands into for a sip of water even though we weren't supposed to.

Then someone would light the dogwood tree lanterns as dusk was arriving and gather the children around for the legend of the dogwood. Even though the Easter messages are weeks past, we would remind the children and Dogwood Festival guests that the cross-shaped blossom caught the blood stains of Christ and bear His crown of thorns in their centers. That though this sacrifice, we know the grace of God as we live His Life here on earth -- the Life we were uniquely created to lead. And by this time it would be quite chilly so we would move to our chairs against the old house on Hope Street, seeking the warmth that the sun stored in those old bricks, and we'd listen to the frogs in the meadow and look skyward to see if we can still get a peek of Orion and say goodbye... for now.
And we would watch the dogwood 'til dark and take bets to see how long the whites would show, and then we would talk about summer and lightning bugs and baseball. We'd watch the blossoms as long as we could and hope that tomorrow would bring us just one more day to look at them.
The little ones would start to yawn and we'd say our "goodbye"s and "how fun"s, and we'd turn out the lanterns and head to bed and wonder what people do who don't have a dogwood tree in their yards.