I was laughing out loud for like a full minute by the time I found this place. I had been seeing this sign off the highway that just said PEONIES-> all summer and since tomorrow’s my last day i decided to follow it. I followed a series of about 6 PEONIES-> signs that took me further and further away from the main road, into the woods on dirt and gravel. I was laughing because I was becoming certain that there either were no peonies or “peonies” was a spot in the woods a couple of guys lie in wait for tourists to rob. But it was actually a very sweet little peony farm, though all the peonies had been harvested already so the field was full of bushes with sharp, naked stems sticking up. And I met the farmer, who was a gorgeous lady in her 70s with long silver hair and a handmade quilted apron whose name was, no joke, Taffina, and had, seriously, one brown eye and one blue eye. I, embarrassingly, told her about the poem “Peonies,” by Mary Oliver, and she said she’d put it up on her website.
