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Jack London on California - Poppies

The Golden Poppies

Living with his wife Bess and two daughters in the hills on the east side of San Francisco Bay, the London's chose to rent a bungalow on the outer edge of city life. Along with the bungalow, they also rented a poppy field that caused endless strife in trying to chase what he considered 'city folk' off his little field of wilderness. Of the poppy's themselves he wrote :

" We looked forward to the coming of the poppies, did Bess and I, looked forward as only creatures of the city may look who have been long denied. … The first poppies came, orange-yellow and golden in the standing grain, and we went about gleefully, as though drunken with their wine, and told each other that the poppies were there. We laughed at unexpected moments, in the midst of silences, and at times grew ashamed and stole forth secretly to gaze upon our treasury. But when the great wave of poppy-flame finally spilled itself down the field, we shouted loud, and danced, and clapped our hands, freely and frankly mad. "

Of the invaders he wrote much more.

" And then came the Goths…It is not good to be of the city folk. Of this I am convinced. There is something in the mode of life that breeds alarming condition of blindness and deafness, or so its seems with the city folk that come to my poppy field. Of the many to whom I have talked ethically not one has been found who ever saw the warnings so conspicuously displayed, while of those called out to from the porch, possibly one in fifty has heard. "

And these six young men he tells us net of came forst to the door to ask for drinks of water, nodded understanding that they would not touch the poppies, and then their treachery began :

They smote the poppy field beneath my windows, spread out fan-shaped six wide, picking with both hands, and ripped a swath of destruction through the very heart of the field. No cyclone traveled faster or destroyed more completely. I shouted after them, but they sped on the wings of the wind, great regal poppies, broken stalked and mangled, training after them in their wake - the most high-handed act of piracy, I am confident, ever committed off the high seas. "