The Pageantry of Memory in Blossom and Bloom

As I've been highlighting over the last several posts (with video, even!), I'm wandering the place I once called home and letting the memories of what once was waft over me. Time has marched on and the trees that once shaded the backyard are no more. The corkscrew willow that graced the side of our hill is a distant memory. The eucalyptus on the hill looking down over the valley below have long since been removed or cut short. There's a lot "missing" if you choose to dwell on it.

What isn't missing, however, is new life. What isn't missing is the presence of wildness, of wonder, of small things that wouldn't register on anyone's collective radar except for those who walked amongst it. This Cape Honeysuckle you see here is a prime example of this. It's rich orange-reds, tubular petals, and leafy green raiment have been at this house since my earliest memories. Clinging to the hillside, across "the ditch" carved at its base, these bushes were both glorious and mysteriously terrifying to my toddler self. The colours, the mystery of what lay beneath their tightly folded skirts, and the dusty piles of excavated dirt from gophers all fold neatly into the binding of this story.

We construe some sort of poetry about our past, a prose befitting of the grandeur we wish to ascribe to these significant experiences. Not everything is wonderful or glorious. I have stories there too but, we offset the dark places with the delightful and fanciful.

It's a privilege to walk here, through these neurological halls of etched time. To wonder and wander, to still gasp in excitement over what once was, to wonder as to the future estate of something so fragile, so organic as a bush with flowers. For it to have survived forty plus years is no mean feat; for it to surve forty more is an impossibility. It's captured here, in resonant halls of bliss, for now and maybe, future generations or families will enjoy the same.

Today, I will wander again and find memories still: within the cracks and crevices of the eucalyptus bark that remains, within the shiny leaves of mirror plants, the peeling black paint of wrought iron fencing, the churned dirt of gophers, and the plumb protuberances of aloe.

I will find myself lost, if only for a moment, in the ripe loquats hanging over our wall from the neighbours garden, in the orange bulbs of developing pomegranates in our abandoned orchard below, in the rickety stairs we used to climb down to the same. I will find myself lost in a place and time no longer my own but so intrinsic to who I am now.

I will embrace the good with the bad, the poetry and the pageantry, the heartache and the promise because without them, I could not write, I could not speak, I could not understand what it is to love and be loved, to hurt and be hurt, to thrive and to be famished.

I will take part in the pageantry of memory in blossom and bloom and there find myself again.

May it ever be so.

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