Every time I walk around the Back Bay Fens, I seem to notice something strange, new, and wonderful. Today was no exception. There's a neck of the pond near the halfway point in my lunchtime lap that has been nothing but an island of mud for all the years I've passed it - one time an aspiring modern artist stacked three broken televisions in a column there, but most of the time it was just mud and the occasional duck, goose, or crane. But this afternoon I round the corner, expecting Mud Island, and find that the whole strip has been covered with blazing pinkish-purple lupines (a wildflower that looks like this)! How cool is that? I don't know if they occurred naturally, or whether it was another guerilla art student at work, but this sure beats the T.V. Totem Pole... makes me think of Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud", even though he was talking about daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.