Giddy heat photos of the golden showers: Part 2

Laburnum makes me wish I was a feather. Makes garbage amount of sense, but it’s just such a bright happy poisonous flower that I want to wear shorts and run around like a street urchin*, barefoot and careful to not pluck it even though I would like to put in a steel tumbler** by the kitchen window.

The summer heat -- 44 degrees yesterday, did you read? – makes me have baby seizures -- or whatever you call three thousand thoughts a second. My tongue often can’t keep up. A keyboard is sometimes better.

*I say street urchin because of my cropped hair. I took it all off. Now I feel free and lightheaded, and unneccesarily giddy. I’m the kid in the lifebuoy ad. I don’t take so long in the shower. I don’t need scrunchies. I have an especially good time putting on my swimming cap. Hurrah for a short crop!

**I never usually call a glass a tumbler. That would be a throwback to chemistry class and Shanta Ma’am and the smell of amonia and failure to remember abbreviations and valencies and whatever the hell h2so4 and 3 and 2 and 1 meant.

Three thousand a second, my thoughts, I told you, all fast fast.

I was talking about laburnum. When I have a camera, I take a picture. Sometimes the pictures come out badly. The yellow is smudged, my thumb is in view, the angles are bad, and cars everywhere are honking at me to get out of the way and get a life.

But just look

Akbar Road, Lutyens, New Dally

Unsteady hand, Janpath roundabout

Nothing like bits of pinky and rim of car to kill ze photo

But oh do look!

Outside my grandparents house.
Laburnum, Amaltas, Cassia Fistula, Purging Fistula, Golden Showers -- names for the same.

Same traumatic roundabout; in bloom

Turns out, I've swooned about these lead kindly laburnums 2 years ago as well in part 1. It's an old obsession I say, but what's a summer without such enticing posion?

I'm going to leave the raving prose about the Indian summer to Sir Mark T: In the parks where I walk the golden gulmohar trees, the purple jacarandas and the lemon yellow Indian laburnum are all blooming. There are autumnal trees too, mighty arjuns for instance standing tall amidst carpets of the deep brown leaves they have shed.

Meanwhile, ten points if you knew Laburnum was the national flower of Thailand. I read it here. Twenty if you knew the fruit pulp was a mild laxative. Heh.