Poppies

The Poppy flower display was awesome this year.
I tried to capture it, but photos can only give a sense of the blooming spectacle of orange brilliance.

They're so elegant, and you wonder how their spindly little stems can hold up their large heads which wave in the breeze. There's also something about their paper-thin petals...seemingly unreal.
Georgia O'Keefe is from quite nearby here...Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
Her painting of a poppy flower is very famous.  I've always admired it.  Any flower is suitable to paint.

They hand out little paper poppies every Memorial Day; veterans organizations sell them; I think originally it was the veterans' widows or Ladies Aid Society which sold them to earn money for burials...not sure...need to look that up.  My mother-in-law would certainly know; I'll ask her.
Sometimes, that's just more fun than Google...

There is a little girl named Poppy at the school where I current am teaching.  Cute fit.
And lastly, I happen to love poppy seed pie...it's a Belgian/Czechoslovakian creation made north of here..where many Belgians settled. I learned to love it after often consuming too much from a bakery near my grandma's house. 
(Like Elaine on an episode from Seinfeld, I wonder if I'd pass a drug test after consuming my usual
several pieces of poppyseed pie?)  It is to die for.