in bloom

on hydrangeas and life

My hydrangeas are blooming. I say my hydrangeas like they belong to me but the truth is, they belong to my long gone grandmother and always will. This was her house, they were her plants. She nurtured them, she cut them and put little bouquets of them out on her kitchen table, shades of purple, pink and blue signifying that we were in the summer months, the good months, as they were when I was a kid.

We bought this house five years ago after living in its apartment for three years, and when we took it over, we immediately got rid of some overgrown bushes that intruded on the aesthetic of the house. We put in a brick walkway up to the previous hidden living room door. We drastically changed the way the house looked, save for the hydrangeas. They stayed. The two bushes, not even centered or anything, just planted in a haphazard way, remained and while we gave thought to digging them up and planting them in a more symmetrical manner, it was my final decision to leave them as is, the way I remembered them from years ago.

There was one year when they hydrangeas did not bloom and I was crestfallen. Every day I went outside and examined the branches, which were flush with leaves but no blooms, and I’d get upset, as if it were someone how my fault, as if I was disappointing my grandmother. I mourned the bushes that year, gave thanks to them for all the summers they made me so happy. I didn’t expect them to ever bloom again. But next June brought blooms and bursts of color and joy into my heart. I silently thanked the flowers for returning; I promised them I would take good care of them.

I’ve been wary since that one empty year and the beginning of each summer finds me skulking around the hydrangea bushes, examining them, a detective looking for floral clues. I whisper to them, ask them kindly to show up. They did, this year. But they showed up a little late. There were green buds on the bushes and I spent fifteen, twenty minutes outside willing those buds to grow into the flowers we would call “snowballs” when we were little. How thrilled we always were to see them sprout, and that joy, that elation, was a constant for me every summer. When I saw the first bit of color peek out from between the buds a few weeks ago, my heart leapt. They were coming. They hydrangeas, the snowballs, were coming. Pretty soon there were flowers, thick and bright, the blues and pink and purples, and I was able to rest my worries.

The summer months are here. July and August, bloated with heat and humidity, days almost agonizingly long, the constant smell of hamburgers drifting around the neighborhood every evening. They are months that drag on to me, they are months to be derided. I do not like the summer. Not like when I was five or ten or fifteen. The only good thing about these months are the flowers that come back each year, the ones that only go away in the winter and don’t die, the ones who reappear and say, I’m here again, love me. They give me hope, they make me feel like things that appear dead can be resurrected, that there’s hope for renewal and rebirth. I depend on these flowers, especially the hydrangeas, to lift me up, to make me believe and hope and dream.

My hydrangeas are blooming. Each day a new batch shows its colors, filling the bushes in. The pink ones are especially vibrant this year. I can’t wait to bring some inside to place on my kitchen table like grandma used to do. That they came back to me once again is surely a sign that life goes on, and that is something I need to believe right now.