My dear favorite

 

I love yellow roses.

After all when I was a young woman, there was a song about "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

But Wikipedia answers the whispered remarks that I never quite heard when enjoying being from Texas in a northern state! 

"The earliest known version is found in Christy's Plantation Melodies. No. 2, a songbook published under the authority of Edwin Pearce Christy in Philadelphia in 1853. Christy was the founder of the blackface minstrel show known as the Christy's Minstrels. Like most minstrel songs, the lyrics are written in a cross between a parody of a generic creole dialect historically attributed to African-Americans and standard American English. The song is written in the first person from the perspective of an African-American singer who refers to himself as a "darkey," longing to return to "a yellow girl" (that is, a light-skinned, or bi-racial woman born of African/African-American and European-American progenitors).^[3]

The soundtrack to the TV miniseries James A. Michener's Texas dates a version of the song to June 2, 1933, and co-credits both the authorship and performance to Gene Autry and Jimmy Long. Don George reworked the original version of the song, which Mitch Miller made into a popular recording in 1955 that knocked Bill Haley & His Comets' "Rock Around The Clock" from the top of the Best Sellers chart in the U.S.^[4] Miller's version was featured in the 1956 motion picture Giant, and reached #1 on the U.S. pop chart the same week Giant star James Dean died. Stan Freberg had a simultaneous hit of a parody version in which the bandleader warred with the snare drummer, Alvin Stoller, who also featured prominently in Miller's arrangement. Billboard ranked Miller's version as the No. 3 song of 1955.^[5][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Rose_of_Texas_(song)

I also just discovered Roy Rogers and Dale Evans made a movie of the same name, with more songs, in 1944. I may have seen it, but don't remember it.

I'm pretty sure before I left Texas at 7 years old, that I'd learned some version of this song, along with "I've been working on the Railroad," and "She'll be coming round the mountain." The last two kind of merged in my mind. But there was definitely a chorus where "I'm in the kitchen with Dinah, strumming on the old banjo." And that chorus goes on to sing, "Fee Fi, Fiddle-dee-I-O," and so on.

I may have been scurried off to Missouri where I'd receive a less "southern" education. But it was still white-washed. It wasn't till I was in college that I ever even met a black person. And a few years later, married and living in Connecticut, I signed up to help blacks get equal housing. Big changes.

Today's quote:

We do not need to travel around the world when the source of all joy and all beauty is right within us.

EKNATH EASWARAN