Magnolia

I’m not talking about the Tom Cruise movie or the Joanna Gaines line. I’m talking about the magnolia trees as they bloomed this spring. Every single first without my husband has sent me into a tailspin, and I know it will continue but springtime threw me into one headfirst.

Springtime is supposed the time of year where you wake up from your long winter nap refreshed. You want to do all those things you dreamt of all winter. All the warm weather activities you missed. I didn’t come out of winter refreshed. I came out of it wanting to go back into it. It’s much easier to hide your depression in winter. The days are shorter. It does mean the nights are nights are longer, but since my sleep is and was so chopped up bad, it didn’t matter. Spring wasn’t an awakening to me. It felt like another punishment. A big joke. I couldn’t hide my sadness in the darkness. People want you to be bright and perky come spring. I didn’t want to be. My heart was still, and still is broken. I dread each day growing longer.

We have a beautifully (I think) landscaped yard. It came that way, and over the 5 years we lived in the house together we cultivated it to be our own. I spent the first year watching it, seeing what grew where and how I could improve it. If things needed to be taken out. I spent countless hours out there working on our gardens. I dug out tree stumps by hand and leveled the ground with a shovel and a rake in the backyard where we had trees removed. If I had trouble digging a hole, I would ask my husband for help, but mostly I did it myself. Every night, I would take him around the yard and show him what I did that night and what was blooming (if it was that time of year).

Planting, moving, fertilizing, watering. I spent even more time planning what I was going to plant where. I made pictures of my ideas. I made lists of flowers I wanted. I made lists of when they would bloom. I bought books to look at. I had catalogues I would pour over to get ideas. I googled plants when I started to kill them as inevitably I would, so I could nurse them back to life. I loved hummingbirds and butterflies coming into the yard so I tried to plant flowers that would attract them. Last year I bought micro lenses for my camera and started taking pictures of the flowers. I would spent as many countless hours editing those pictures as I took caring for the flowers growing.

I had been looking for a specific tree but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was a haphazard looking for; it wasn’t a make or break for the yard. Last spring I found it at the nursery. It was a magnolia. As soon as I saw it was a magnolia I felt foolish, I should have known that’s what it was. I’m a self taught gardener. More or less a trial and error type; try a little this year, if it goes well, I’ll plant a lot more next year. Try this fertilizer, if it doesn’t work, get another. I’m sure had I described what I was looking for to someone I could have figured it out about two years sooner, but I had a picture in my head of what it was. As soon as I saw it with it’s yellow petals, I knew that’s what I had been looking for.

We planted that tree last spring. It’s petals fell. I never saw it bloom. They say after they’re rooted they will bloom twice in a year. I never will see it bloom. But my husband will. He probably already has. That was the last “big” thing I wanted in the yard. The rest was just flowers. Those are easy to rotate.

When the flowers started blooming this spring, it made a pit in my stomach. If houses looked particularly nice, I actually had urges to drive into the yard and ruin the flowers. I obviously didn’t act on them. This is still happening to me. Something so simple that I loved; just ripped from me.

Gardening had became my escape, as the kids got older. I stopped reading as much, because it felt selfish. Gardening felt like something for everyone. Something I thought about and planned. I thought how my husband and I could do it together. I would get excited about something in the yard and I would go the door and yell for him to come see, not taking “No,” for an answer. I was proud I was able to do something, make something beautiful. I had never had time to do anything like it before. I loved being able to cut flowers and bring them in the house and make arrangements. I am sure that my husband held it against me because when we first started dating, I had a less enthusiastic reaction about flowers and more than once forgot the flowers he had given me on the counter without putting them in water. There was, and maybe still is, an orchid he had given me for our first anniversary I kept alive for a year and a half.

When I can’t sleep, I will get up and walk once the sun comes up. There is a gambrel house down the road from me that has a magnolia tree in it. I’ve stopped in front of that house more than once and cried. I cried for so many things. The spring I never wanted to come. The spring I didn’t think I would live to see. The spring I didn’t want to live through. It had yellow petals. I also thought about lighting the tree on fire as the morning sun danced through those yellow petals I was so jealous of blooming. I wondered if the homeowners ever saw me staring at the tree, tears streaming openly down my face. If they knew in particular it was their yellow magnolia, in the sunshine on those morning walks, making me cry, when I was walking to escape my bad dreams. That it’s beauty was giving me living nightmares in broad daylight that I didn’t know how to hide from. The nightmare my life had become.