Despite all those bygone years the memory remains of having my photograph taken.
That was a big deal before phones turned into cameras.
Circa 1957, I’m standing amid clumps of daffodils where Dad posed me for my Easter photo.
Got my new white bucks and Sunday finest on, fresh flattop haircut and a gap-toothed smile, but I best not step on any daffodils, and I best not stain my white suede shoes. Right, Carl?
Dad pushes a button, and the Polaroid makes a whirring noise as the self-developing film slides forth. He peels away a layer and there I am.
That photo was lost in the dustbin of years gone by. So I thought.
Half a century later going through my late mother’s possessions, I discovered that photo.
Beneath a worn leather-bound Bible in a desk hid a yellow-brown photograph. The daffodils were just as I remember. Five clumps. Two in front. Three in back.
Those daffodils stand tall in memory because of what happened next.
Out comes Grandmom and what does she do? She cuts them and goes inside.
I stare at the amputated stalks I so carefully avoided, then run into the farmhouse. Grandmom’s at the sink putting the daffodils in a Mason jar.
Into it she pours blue food coloring. Soon, the flowers draw up the dye and delicate blue-green tributaries run through spring’s golden trumpeters. Sheer magic.
Of course daffodils give me the first cue that spring will pry winter’s icy fingers from the land, but they never fail to remind me of that Easter when worry gave way to joy.
Camellias don’t bloom in my boyhood memory. We had no “cold flowers.” I got an introduction to camellias long ago on a gray January day.
I profiled camellia expert Colonel Parker Connor Jr. who lived on Edisto Island at Oak Island Plantation.
The morning was cool as we walked the grounds. Colonel Connor pointed to a delicate blossom. “That’s a Miss Charleston.”
You may think the beautiful camellias could never have rivals, but you’d be wrong. I present dogwoods’ snow-white blossoms.
Mom loved them and long had one near an old propane tank. I loved that tree’s snow-white emblematic blossoms.
Whenever I see snowstorm-like cottony dogwoods popping out in dark woods they spirit me back to my long-gone Georgia childhood.
Change never stops. That sink where Grandmom poured blue food coloring into a Mason jar lies in ashes. That yellow-brown Polaroid print taken by my late father is again misplaced
Come spring, daffodils will rise through the ashes of Grandmom’s old home. They’ll convince me winter is giving way to spring.
Flowers outlast us. When we are in the ground or our ashes scattered or in some urn, daffodils, camellias, and dogwoods will keep bringing beauty to the land.
This Easter I’ll go back to that same spot of daffodils in my new white bucks. I’ll set up my Canon and take one of those “then and now” photographs.
I’ll be careful not to trample the great, great, great grandblooms of those original daffodils; for the old ways sure die hard, don’t they?