Calling upon a neighbor ... too late

This is what I missed this week.

This is not my picture. It is borrowed from all-creatures.org.

On a heap of humus above a giant boulder, within the woods behind my home, this leafy being dwells. I met it for the first time last year, and the sight made me gasp, it really did. I'm not being overly dramatic. I am truly in love with life, in all its myriad forms -- and this one was new to me. Nowhere else in these woods have I ever seen it.

It raised small, white flowers bravely from the leaf litter into the still-chilly spring air. They gave off a faint, sweet fragrance. I surrounded it with a little border of rocks, so that I could find the spot again.

Scarcely a week later, the flowers were gone and the leaves had wilted.

For this is Saxifraga virginiensis, Early Saxifrage, one of the first wildflowers of spring, and like other ephemereals, its life above ground is oh-so-brief. The roots persist; through summer's heat and winter's worst they wait, for just that moment in the early months of the year to display their floral glory.

Saxifrage means stone-breaker in Latin, for this little beauty loves to grow upon rocky slopes, where no doubt its roots do help, by infinitesimal degrees, to break down even the biggest boulders.

This year, I missed the show. I had been meaning to get back out there to that spot, but I miscalculated, I waitdd too long. And today, when I finally made my way back to the circle of stones, the flowers were already shriveled and yellowed, the leaves wilting away.

So this is not my picture. It is borrowed. Perhaps next year I will take my own.