April 28, 2025

Magnolia

Every year since my children started school, which is 13 years now, I’ve spent the winter walking past this magnolia tree with the line from Barbara Reid’s Picture a Tree running through my head: “Every winter tree holds spring sleeping like a baby.” Every year, the people with the gift of this tree in their garden decorate the tree with baubles at Christmas, and leave the decorations up long after the holidays are over, which I don’t mind a bit, because there’s something about silver reflecting a rare sunbeam against February’s gloom against a blue sky which the kind of thing that gets me through winter. The buds on this tree are a promise, one I’m counting on, and every year it happens. I remember going out of our way during the two springs my children’s schools were closed on account of the pandemic just so we wouldn’t miss it, en-route to pick up take-out, which was pretty much life’s highlight at that point. In addition to spring.

Things bloom, which has never stopped being a miracle. What a thing to share the world with trees that make flowers like this, how extravagant and just wild.