Big Yellow Taxi

You don't know what you got 'til it's gone

Joni Mitchell originally wrote Big Yellow Taxi in 1970, after looking out of her hotel window on her first trip to Hawaii.

She rerecorded it, with very slightly modified lyrics, in 2007, on her album Shine.

The line, You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, (which became the title of a hit by Cinderella in 1988) has been on my mind just lately, both at home and walking in the Chilterns, where we live.

 

The summer is not over yet, but the weather's changeable, and the glory of the flower days has passed.

Hey farmer
Put away your DDT
Give me spots on my apples

But leave me the birds and bees
Please

It's doesn't seem to have been a bad year for bees, but that is relative. Joni sang about the danger of DDT.  Neonicotinoids neither fit the scansion nor rhyme that easily with bees....

So they paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone

Some things fly past so fast, you don't even notice.....

'Til they're gone.....

This time of year, you begin to see fruits, and nuts, ripen on the trees....

And then they are gone....  Stolen by squirrels....

The flowers that so splashed the landscape a short while ago....

Have set their seeds and flown....

So they paved paradise 

And put up a parking lot

Don't it always seem to go
You don't know what you got 'til it's gone

© 2007; Crazy Crow Music 

Hope Joni is well