Intertwined

It is May, but for a week I will be preoccupied with a distant February and the birth of two women nearest my heart. On the leading Friday in the sequence, I spend several minutes at the border of the yard perched above a carpet of vinca sloping down and away to the street, their minute blue and violet blooms winking back at me. Several mature fir trees tower over me, their immense boughs drooping like open arms. I lower my head, imagining their soft red buds gently pressing downward, cupping my shoulders. Inside, it feels steadying, like a heavy blanket draped over me. I am admiring ten ruby-red blooms from a single peony plant, preening in the midday sun, each bloom undulating in subtle irregularity within the circumference of the shrub, influenced only by the constant of gravity, and the faintly palpable inhale-and-exhale of air in this general vicinity of the atmosphere.

I have witnessed this place, at this time on the calendar for many seasons, each time all the variables involved producing a reasonable facsimile of sameness in the way these atoms arrange themselves. There is an intertwined uniqueness here too, a complexity in the organic, connected nature of things, that is, an unrepeatable expression of being. I shift my focus slightly toward Lady fern fronds intermingled among the peonies in caress. I close my eyes and there in the dark I make a intentional attempt to commit to memory the image of these ten blooms. I pause, motionless in my self-imposed solitude, then open my eyes wide as if to capture some previously unnoticed element before me. Finding only the sensation of the sun warm and bright on my face, I walk away crestfallen and empty-handed, knowing there will never be another arrangement of reality quite like this, and all of it just an impermanent memory.

Eight days more finds me overlooking the same ten blooms dawning a magenta pearlescence in this instance, quivering in-place with the late afternoon shade. In my mind, I am imagining two precious tow-headed girls, looking up from their crib, the pupils of their eyes like bottomless shimmering opalescent pools. I close my eyes, thinking about the gift that is two lifetimes together, two identical expressions of the same genome, each influencing the reality uniquely that is their world in surround. My brain swims with possibilities among the countless memories I have collected. Like these ten blooms before me, there is a beauty in all existence that is but a glimpse at infinity, just a brush with ethereality.

Opening my eyes again, I take note of the Douglas firs in seemingly permanent sway overhead, the carpet of Vinca still winking and the Lady ferns snug tight with the peonies about me. All is at it should be to the naked eye, and yet I am seeing with newly sharpened vision. I first crouch, then kneel and reach out to embrace these ten blooms. Leaning-in, I gently pull the circumference to my face that I might breathe deeply their essence. There is something eternal here, a connectedness of all our cumulative substance. The subtle peony-scented lushness overflows my senses. I close my eyes and think about the state of being intertwined.