My lucky night

There wasn't anything good on TV.  There seldom is.  My contribution to the backlog on Tivo consists of old movies and a couple of older ones.  There's also some volleyball and the MLB broadcast of Don Larsen's perfect game.  If I watch something that began on television, it's likely on YouTube, where someone who labels himself "Free the Kinescopes!" has been posting shows like Studio One from the Truman Administration.  

All this is to set the scene at about 8:45 tonight.  I'd stopped watching the Buster Keaton documentary on Tivo and had returned to live TV.  It was set to the Philadephia PBS station and showing a Doc Martin, which I've never watched.  I still haven't; I was reading something on the iPad.  

I don't remember how it happened, but I looked up from the iPad and there were chicory flowers onscreen.  Chicory flowers grow along the country roads around here too, and I've seen some as well protruding through cracks in the pavement in Allentown proper, just off Tilghman Street. They mean summer, they mean pretty flowers where they're not expected, they mean life thriving in inhospitable places where they're not welcome and called names, they're determined and indomitable.  

I ran back the footage to the beginning, right after Doc Martin ended.  WHYY was filling the minutes before the top of the hour with a short feature on a local artist.  

She explained that she couldn't travel far, so she decided to make her art with the materials available to her, and that included a weedy vacant lot across from her studio.  As she walked through the lot, identifying brushweed, milkweed and other resident plants, I paused it on a frame that held chicory in the foreground and the artist in the background, and hurriedly snapped a screen shot with my phone.  

Then I recorded a couple of video clips so I could keep the memory of someone else celebrating the wildflowers I also like and which so many others refer to as ugly weeds.