Hang in there Muse.

For the last couple of days I've been driving Muse nuts.  She knew there was something rattling around in my brain and the only way to rid myself of this was to put it to paper.

Here's the thing.  I was humming, la, la, la-ing and singing part of a ditty (at least I thought it was a ditty) around the place until both Frankie and Muse wanted to throttle me.  It went something like this "....I could while away the hours, decorating all the flowers....If I only had a brain."  Why, oh why could I not rid myself of this?  I kind of thought it might be a song from "The Wizard of Oz" and something "Scarecrow" might have sung but, let's face what I was singing made absolutely no sense at all, we don't decorate flowers. We can decorate 'with' flowers and that's about it.

Finally this morning I decided I was going to try to solve this mystery. After a little research I discovered...boy was I wrong, sort of.  I discovered the song I was 'ditty-ing' is titled "Brain" and is indeed from "The Wizard of Oz" and "Scarecrow" did sing it.  The music to the song was composed by Harold Arlen, and the lyrics were written by E.Y. Harburg.  And, this is how the line of the song goes.

"I could while away the hours conferrin' with the flowers; consultin' with the rain."  Whew, I never would have come up with that....but it sure makes a lot more sense than what I was singing.  No wonder Muse and Frankie were about to cause me bodily harm.

Now I'm at peace with that and I can move on. Which I have and if you'll indulge me I'm going to take you back in time.

As kids, during summer break we spent a lot of time outside, playing sports like mush-ball, badminton and touch football. Sometimes on rainy days we would spend hours playing card games on the patio. We would also spend afternoons walking around our yards collecting clover, daisy and dandelion flowers then sitting on the warm grass making flower chains, tying stem to stem to see just how long we could make the chain until it finally broke.  These were wonderful times; we would talk and laugh while competing to see who could collect the most flowers with the longest stems in order to have the longest chains. Dandelion flowers were difficult, their stems were thicker and their sap tended to stain our hands, but regardless of the flower choice they all became easier to tie as the sun warmed and slightly wilted the stems.

I'm wondering now if the ditty in my mind had something to do with the memory of flower chains, or it was the other way around.  I guess it really doesn't matter because today... I'm going to "while away the hours conferrin' with the flowers, and when the rain returns this weekend I'm going to spend some time 'consultin' it as well.