You can never hold them for very long: a plucked buttercup's petals pucker and turn to jelly in minutes. You want to hold them, you want to keep the feeling of them close to you forever, but you cannot. The finest vase cannot sustain them. They will barely survive the short trip home in a basket in fact. The sharpest photograph can never record the buoyant freshness of a sprinkling of buttercups bathing in the daylight of a meadow, the elusiveness of their shadowboxes, the lightness of their muscatel. All you can do is sit among them and savor them while they are with us. All you can do is point the camera of your soul toward them and inhale the beauty they exhale. So I sit among them each spring, knowing that July will come and I will no longer be able to hold them. When they disappear, I am not sad to see them go for I know I have made the most of their season. I know that as early as next February, the buttercups will reappear. They have never not reappeared. And when my season on Earth has ended, color me a withered buttercup. Lay me in the ground and I too will be restored.