Some tune
It was a sign and it was the time, when I first encountered peonies. Despite them singing opera into the streets, lusty blooms hypnotizing passersby, as fragrant as roses but wilder, less restrained, they hadn’t quite yet reached me; nor me them.
Rather, I encountered them as expensive orbs—fit for the chin dimples of stern men; big marbles.
The sign, I’d driven by countless times: Fresh Cut Flowers. The time, a post-earthquake rebuild; rewriting perceptions of the world, rededicating love songs to myself.
One restless afternoon, I visited the sparse farm store behind the sign down the road, nodding toward one of three vases in a cooler behind the young cashier. She quoted me $73 for five orbs and I swallowed hard a sharpness in my chest nodded said nothing held up my debit card.
They’ll open, she told me.
Indeed, I watched in near comedic awe as the peonies inhaled into spectacular synchronized backbends that deepened day after day after day after day. As if closed up simply was. Then eventually they drooped, spent, like it all couldn’t have been more worth it. Like it all couldn’t have gone more perfectly, exactly as it went.
And when the tightened bud of my own heart gave way—not just in backbends, not just pressed up to a window, not just under the right conditions, not just with water, not just with thirst, not just with time, not just with her warmth—it beamed at the world.
It, once again, understood (and by that I mean felt) some ineffable transfer that isn’t birth not death doesn’t bloom doesn’t droop but a kids’ game where everybody stands in a circle, palms placed atop palms, clapping one hand to the next at increasing velocity around and around and around and around and around and around and around the circle, singing some tune, laughing.