In
the Perfumed Garden -
bittersweet
memories in the season of the white
blooming things
Most people in Florida are from elsewhere. About three of
every four to be exact. And most come from places that have more pronounced
seasonal changes than Florida, a good number of them coming from “up Nawth”
with its nasty winters and laws that apparently mandate that retirees must move
to Florida upon reaching age 65. Clearly these Yankees are law abiding people.
The tendency among these emigrants is to see Florida as a
place without seasons, a land of 50 weeks of summer and two weeks of brief
winter-like temperatures. And perhaps from their perspective, that is true. But
many of us natives (and especially those of us whose families have been here
five generations like my own) recognize the very subtle changes that mark
Florida’s four clearly definable seasons.
For a plant nut like myself, one of the cues that allows
us to discern distinctive seasons is the kind of plants that bloom at that
time. Fall showers us with golden blooms of rain trees and yellow jacarandas
and the leaves of our Florida maples, sweet gum and Chinese tallow trees which
turn first yellow, then scarlet, before falling around the first of each new
year. I’ve always loved fall, the season of my birth and the season in which
each new school year begins. I’ve often said that life begins anew in fall.
But as my husband and I engaged our nightly walk around
Lake Underhill last week with our celebrity beagle, Daisy (for whom people
actually stop their cars and get out of them to kiss her!), a wonderful scented
warm breeze swept over us. In the grassy
area of the park across the street from the lake itself, the city has planted a
number of magnolia trees. There are few things more truly wonderful than
magnolia blossoms.
Magnolias are among the white blooming things that
transform Florida into a perfumed garden each spring. They are joined by the
heavy perfume of Confederate jasmine and gardenia and the delicate smells of
citrus trees in blossom. It’s almost worth enduring the occasional cold snaps
of December and January when my yard with its many tropical specimens resembles
an Okie or Arkie refugee town shrouded in sheets and newspapers to protect them
from freezing just to be rewarded with such wonderful scents come spring.
Author Marcel Proust once wrote about how certain sounds,
smells, sights can trigger memories of people, places and events gone by. In Swann’s Way, he said, “The past is
hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some
material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us)
which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends upon chance whether
we come on it or not before we ourselves must die.”
As we walked through the dried grasses of the park last
week, blades crackling from lack of water in a spring dry season beginning to
show the first signs of impending climate change, wave after wave of magnolia
perfume swept over us. And for one second, I was transported back to earlier,
more innocent days of Springs Past, of magnolias growing in our shaded yard in
the country, of venerable, ancient magnolias blooming in the quad outside the
dormitories at the University of Florida where I was a resident and my parents
had studied three decades prior, of magnolia family bay trees blooming along
the tracks of the Walt Disney World steam railroad where Andy and I both worked
as conductors in the summer of 1975, even of the magnolias blooming in northern
California during our four year sojourn there whose scents roused modest
homesickness. All of those moments, long gone but fully present in the breeze
swept park last week.
It’s this connection to the land, to a life history in
this place, that largely proves to be the trump card in our decision thus far to
remain in a state whose radical political and developmental changes in the past
two decades have long since caused it to lose any semblance to the Florida in
which I grew up, the Florida I once knew and loved. And so it was with no small
amount of irony that at dinner at Dexters the other night, my long time friend
and fellow Florida native, Bill Fite, and I suddenly broke out into the song we
had learned as children in a Florida who once actually provided music teachers
for its elementary school children:
I
want to wake up
in the
morning
where
the orange blossoms grow.
Where
the sun comes apeepin’
in
where I’m asleepin’
and
the song birds say “Hello!”
I
love the fresh air
and
the sunshine
it’s
good for us, you know…..
So,
make my home in Flo-ri-da
where
the orange blossoms grow.
In the Perfumed Garden the white blooming things provide
a bittersweet reminder of the wonders of this beautiful, flowered place (hence
its Spanish name) even as its current human occupants seem hell-bent on
destroying it.
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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