Pink Magnolia

Spring. Time.

Happy Sunday friends.

I just wanted to say thanks for hanging with me through my irregular writing/posting schedule. Thanks for tolerating, too, that this newsletter has no tidy, packaged content identity. It’s not a baking newsletter or one about grief or nature per se. It really just represents my process of exploring connections between these and other subjects and phenomenon. It is possible this newsletter will always meander, but I agree with Brenda Ueland in If You Want to Write when she notes:

So you see the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas…but they have no big ideas.

The inefficient happy dawdling that is becoming this newsletter feels like an antidote to the compulsory busyness of much of the rest of my life right now. Wandering the trails of big ideas feels like time well spent to me. I hope it does to you too.

The following is a meander through my experience of spring in Georgia as a juxtaposition between bloom schedules and death anniversaries as ways of marking and being in time. It’s a longer read. Maybe good for a Sunday with promising porch weather.

xx

***

Georgia is home now. Again. Am I a prodigal daughter?

My intention in moving back South was to have done it in time to be with my mother—and my father—through their health challenges. My intention was to support them. To love on them. COVID snuck up on the world while we were packing and my mother died in early April 2020 while we sat housebound, helpless, and surrounded by boxes of stuff.

Grief can blind you. It can show up as petty irritability, as disassociation. As hypersensitivity. It can make everything feel greyed out or grating, with no in between. And it gives lie to the idea of time as linear. This is already the start of my third year in the deep, wooded suburbs of Atlanta but during that time, I have journeyed with grief to the bottom of the ocean, through seemingly endless deserts, through old growth forests. And through my spirals, I have found walled off, moonlit gardens accessible only by underground passageways.

As the feeling tone of my grief shifts again, with season and perhaps towards a kind of integration, and as I peek my head out of the cave, my intent is to face joy. To move from shades of grey towards yellows and pinks. Spring in Georgia is a propitious spacetime in which to practice this. I write the word INTENTION in big block letters in my journal and then:  I will train my eyes and heart away from the violent sameness of gas stations and strip malls, from the reckless disregard among drivers and resultant constant accidents, from the endless two-lane highways, crowded by long-suffering , exhaust-choked pine trees, from the pocked and endless asphalt designed by small-hearted planners only to get workers to and from and leaving no room for the bipedal, the two-wheeled, or god forbid the non-human, from the seemingly endless line of bumper-to-bumper SUVs and F-150s, a river of angry red brake lights.

Instead, in iterative and cumulative acts of self-love, I will orient towards phenomena that feed me and offer a more spirit-filled sense of place. In the morning, I will listen for the loudmouth Carolina wren who initiates the communal delineation of  territories from my back porch. I will focus on the way time unfolds here, the way Georgia knows itself through its trees, shrubs, flowers, insects and amphibians. A new year begins here, at least by my calendar, in later January, when the elf orpine starts to bud on Arabia Mountain and the vernal pools, full of clear, cold rainwater, start hosting the spotted salamander and American toad egg masses.

But already, by the second week of February, it’s spring! Trees and shrubs are kicking off a show that will last several more months. The daffodils in my front yard are opening acts. Their green blades push up from still-sleepy bulbs through thick inches of humus and pine straw. Within days pale yellow buds with bowed heads the size of Jordan almonds grow and explode into cheerful, peplumed frills.

The Eastern Redbud is not far behind. This early bloomer has branches that seem to me to reach outward like the thin, graceful arms of a favorite aunt. Her opera gloves are every inch bedecked with tiny flowers the most exquisite purply-pink you’ve ever seen. Forsythia, too, springs up in these early February days. The seriousness of its rail-straight branches jutt up and outward in juxtaposition with its bright, playful yellow blooms. I can’t help but express a tiny but sharp gasp when I spot these yellow and pink delights on my commute. And then there’s the pink magnolia! Gah. So dreamy. Unlike its empress cousin, Magnolia Grandiflora, whose dinner plate sized white velvet blooms don’t begin to appear until May or June, these delicate beauties are flowering all over Georgia by mid-February. They range from palest, lady-powder pink to a deep, almost luminous mauve. The pink magnolias are hybrid cultivates and the forsythia (botanical heroes for having escaped cultivation) are transplants from their native China but both are as ubiquitous and seem as happy here as our native redbud and Grandiflora.

I remember I would call my mom around this time of year when I lived in Wisconsin. One of our exchange rituals involved me complaining about the harsh winds, low temperatures, and amount of snow I was being asked to endure and her gushing about the warmth, sun, and whatever was in bloom. She  knew many common names but focused on color. Georgia spring delighted my mother and she was dramatic and exuberant in her expression of that delight. Sigh! Gasp! When I was with her, and always while driving somewhere because that’s all you do in Atlanta, I’d see her tearing up. Or she’d squeeze my arm with her thin fingers for emphasis when we’d pass a particularly stunning tree.

Depending on the amount of rain we’ve gotten in late January -early February, these explosions of color and joy seem to happen in exuberant, impatient succession. They are a visual Max Roach solo. Life! will not wait! The ruckus pushes me towards the mouth of the cave. As I peek out of its opening and my soul takes its first squinting steps into the light and as I look at these blooms, I fall in a deep tumbling love with life. I want to fall in love with the South. With Georgia and even with Conyers. I want to be a loving, embedded part of my place.

Orienting myself toward botanical delight and tracking it to know it as I am learning to do with the flowering trees, is one way to fall in love. Apparently I am in good company. Henry David Thoreau  tromped out in the still-snowy springs of Concord to scribble the bloom dates of the plants of his place. Aldo Leopold scribbled the bloom dates of the plants of his place in Wisconsin. And regular people, people who want to fall in love each day and who experience themselves as of a place,  have been scribbling similar notes for eons. Thoreau tracked gradual change across many years. My strategies are more tactical, day-to-day. I’m mapping, in fragments, my coming back into the world in a kind of collaboration with these flowers. I’m also counting down to my mother’s death anniversary with each timed flowering. A way of giving her her flowers, even still.

By coincidence or otherwise, the first three bloomers on my track list are edible. The flowers of the redbud tree taste a little green and vaguely nutty. Mature forsythia blooms have a slightly bitter, peppery taste and add cheerful bursts of sunshine to salads or atop fennel upside-down cakes with black pepper strawberries and creme fraîche like the ones I baked for the James Beard Chef’s Boot Camp last spring. And even our Southern floral royalty, the magnolia, has edible petals whose flavor is a subtle floral ginger. One of the reasons I love using seasonal edibles like these in my own baking is because they are a way of acknowledging place and one’s love of it and because they add the element of specific time to the cake’s (or bake’s) story.

That week in early spring when pink magnolias bloom is a beautiful and fleeting moment in the Georgia year. These feminine buds beckon us out of our caves with such hope! Cherry Blossoms get festivals. Rightly so. But perhaps our first sighting of a pink magnolia in bloom deserves its own ceremony. Each of these instances in fact. What’s to keep us from hosting a daffodil dance (preferably in moonlight) or a redbud ritual. Forsythia, cherry and pear, dogwood and so on, marking time, joy, and loss through perhaps, to a culminating ceremony in which we wear the Grandiflora’s  snowy blooms like Philip Treacy hats and whisper flower prayers.

I wanted to craft a private ceremony and communion with a pink magnolia. I wanted to gaze at buds and opening blooms and smooth, moss-patched bark up close. I wanted to sit under one, back to bark, and inhabit the specific, ephemeral moment of the Georgia year that they mark with such softness. I had seen so many while driving to places or on my overlong commute but every last one was enclosed. All on private property. I drove to parks and cemeteries in hope of finding even one on public land where I could sit for a minute and hold the palm of my hand on that cool, mossy bark.

In spring, as I count down to her death anniversary, my mom’s physical absence takes on a sharp quality. I’m also grieving a utilitarian built environment, a lack of commons. Sometimes my part of Georgia feels like an exhibit or zoo. Everything is to be experienced behind glass, from the window of a car. No curb, wayside, or place to pull over. You may sigh, gasp, tear up. You may reach over to squeeze someone’s arm perhaps, but keep moving. And maybe that’s the lesson. But something tells me it’s important to stop. To pull over, out of traffic’s way, and to hold still. To take it in, to hold the bloom right up to your face like a cartoon chipmunk and inhale the sweetness of the moment. Of your place. Neither it nor you will be here long.