Most people are familiar with the Latin phrase carpe diem -- "seize the day." In my painter's life, sometimes it's a season, rather than a day, that asks to be seized -- warm enough or cool enough for plein air painting,or the pale greens of Spring, or the multicolors of autumnal foliage -- or, recently, peony season in my area.

I grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, in a house with a yard where my parents grew plants that pleased them.  My father was devoted to roses, but it is the pink peonies, wet with June dew, and sometimes accompanied by ants to be removed before cut flowers came into the house, that I remember with special appreciation, and that I associate more with my mother. Peony season, in my memory, coincided with Oberlin College's Commencement.  I am a third-generation member of a tribe of Oberlinians -- grandparents, parents, brother, cousins, and now, at least the generation after mine. Like our mother, Alice Crafts Shaver, my brother Phil and I were also born in Oberlin. Because our father, Chester Shaver, was a professor of English at the college, former students, as well as the classmates of both parents and and the occasional distant cousin appeared for visits.  This was an annual time of such a flow of company through our house that I have sometimes explained to city friends that the holidays observed while I was growing up were Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Commencement.

Where I live now, I am not set up to grow peonies, but I am close to a major farmers' Greenmarket, at Union Square in lower Manhattan.  I wait eagerly for the first peonies to appear in the market, and I splurge on buying them for several weeks from vendors whose farms lie in different growing zones from south Jersey to cooler upstate New York. A normal person would just appreciate the peonies for their visual beauty and astonishing fragrances, but I also just must paint the flowers while I can.

It really is a bit obsessive, and this year was especially so. During the past three years I had not been in the city much on Saturdays, the big flower day at Union Square, because Daniel and I were usually at his place on Long Island on weekends. As he has given up that spot, I was able to go peony-mad in May and June.

As I did so, and looked back on my peony paintings from previous years, I noticed several things. Most striking to me is the presence in the work of 2000 to 2010 of bachelor's buttons, and, in one case, irises, with the peonies.  This year, vegetables, fruits and other flowers have been coming into the market at times different from what I have been used to, or not showing up at all. These past two years, I have seen bachelor's buttons in the market only rarely, and, most recently, only early this July. I don't know if they are unprofitable to grow for sale, or whether their absence from Union Square has something to do with climate change in our part of the world. In any case, my most recent peony paintings depict peonies alone.

Here, in chronological order of execution, is a selection:

The other major thing that strikes me is that, collectively, the vases set off a meditation on the combination of the relatively permanent and the totally fugitive.  The containers arrived by diverse paths:

-- a square glass vase designed after Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a gift brought from Glasgow by my first husband, Keith Crandell

-- a green stoneware vase made by and given to my father by his friend James Southworth, in the 1950s

-- a commercially made white pitcher I bought for myself

-- a stoneware apple wine pitcher, a gift brought from Germany by my cousin Sue Rambow

-- a commercially made cylindrical Japanese vase I bought for myself

I make use of the containers over and over, trying to master the intricacies of their shapes and glazes, but the flowers are always different and must be caught while they are here.

So - carpe your day, but don't forget to appreciate what remains stable in your life.