As Time Goes By

Who knew there were varieties of azaleas that bloom twice each year? I grew up thinking of azaleas as a spring blossom, reliable sign of May in central New Jersey. Pink, white, salmon, purple: their hues varied but never their timing. The azaleas in my front yard, the shrubs dotting the university campus that was my personal park across the street, these flowered each year right around my early May birthday. They bloomed the same weeks as the magnolias--a whole grove of them a few blocks from home. I inherited boxes of photos snapped by my father each spring, my sisters and I dressed in party wear, faces forward, pink and white magnolia petals a curtain behind us. How many Mother's Day albums did these fill?

And here I sit: October in Philadelphia, white flowers feathering an azalea bush next to my bench. My daughter was a Philadelphia October baby, born into a season of gold maple leaves and red apples, crimson asters and bold orange mums. Last Sunday she turned thirty and I spiraled into a wash of memory; I have been pondering the texture of time. Some months and even years of her life have been viscous, slow moving, even gloppy or sticky at times. Now it seems whole decades have flowed rapidly around bends I never saw from the banks on which I stood as a new mother.

Thirty years ago minus a week or two, my mother wheeled her first grandchild, me walking beside the two women I'd become sandwiched between. We strolled around my block in sharp fall light, through crunching oak leaf piles, each of us lost in reverie. Suddenly, she looked at me, confused, startled. "I was just trying to figure out who you are," she said. "I just realized I've been thinking the baby is you." She giggled sheepishly when she added, "I just realized I'm not thirty years old any more." I retorted with something sarcastic, something that indicated that I thought maybe she should look in the mirror once in a while, as if her dislocation had anything to do with her salt and pepper hair and a few deeply etched laugh lines around her mouth. Someone once said we are all, always, every age we've ever been. I wish I could remember who said it.

My mother has been gone almost 12 years now. When she died, my baby sister planted a magnolia tree in her own yard up in Massachusetts. Each year, for a decade, my sister called or wrote saying "Mom's magnolia blossomed for her birthday again!" We decided the flowers, appearing on a spring bloomer in mid-September in New England, had to be some sort of benevolent sign. My mother's grandchildren ranged in age from eight to eighteen the year their grandmother died. This year the youngest is almost twenty. From Massachusetts, my sister writes me that a horticulturist friend has clued her in: it seems there is a species of magnolia that blooms twice a year. Who knew? I need to tell her about my azaleas. We will laugh at our naivete. We will laugh sheepishly, and then secretly long for our former ignorance. We will long for a time when the off-season appearance of a few fragrant petals could feel like a miracle.