Peony Season

One of my favorite moments of the season where I am held by my gardens is when my peonies bloom. I inherited them from one of the women who raised me. The bushes that bloom are older than I am, 50 or so. They’ve been dug up and moved twice. Every year their abundance astonishes me.

What a miracle, to bloom magnificent and fragrant and huge and soft but only for the briefest time. And then die back and lie dormant for another 11 months, only to be reborn again. Over and over and over.

These peonies were lovingly cared for by the women who raised me. They were anxiously awaited every spring. And when they arrived we filled jars and vases and shared them and savored them and were in awe that all the rooms could smell like peonies because they just gave so much of themselves to the season and to us.

Those same women gave SO much of themselves to me. They are the lineages I claim, blood and not blood. They taught me my magic, they nurtured my wild and my weird, they used every tool they had to give me the start to a beautiful life. I think of them every single time I fill a vase, every time I walk through the kitchen and feel the waft of peony in the air, every time I wait and wait for the fat round buds to bloom in their many petals.

I wish they were here to see what I did with that foundation. I wish I could deliver vases full of fat blooms over to their kitchens. I wish they could see the threads they gave me that I wove into the life and family of my dreams, grief and sorrow and joy and loss all included.

Here’s the magic, tho, of the people who know us to the stardust of ourselves who we find in every lifetime: I think they can see who we become eons before we become it. I think the magic of that love is they see all the iterations before they happen. And they love every single one.

My own beautiful kiddos are tucked into their bunks upstairs, and now I have that end of the magic. I can see the lives their stardust could create and they are so beautiful. I see the things about them they don’t even know yet. Living is beautiful, even when it is hard.

To my mom and Aunt Jo, I hope you can see us, and if you can’t I hope you can smell our peonies.