2 minute read
“Peonies Blooming, Strasbourg Reunion”
Adele NeJame
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We walk the backyard garden together lucky to see them, given their short blooming season, just seven days, they say.
I marvel at the deeply lobed petals like torn lace wound tight doubling the crown’s beauty in the pink light.
Some say they stand for compassion, that nymphs are hiding in their petals and so goes the myth of funeral flowers.
But I have fallen in love with this garden— at first sight—all three levels cared for tenderly and with Denise
for some reason I have yet to work out. Perhaps for the moment she saw us drive up and called out to her brother, my Frederic,
from her balcony: welcome home stranger— this after a forty-year absence, the extent of her scolding.
Or maybe it’s just her peonies bursting with color that take me where language cannot go.
The whole family has gathered this perfect afternoon to celebrate. We all sit outside at a long picnic table
under an arbor of trees, surrounded by peonies and climbing roses while Jean-Claude cooks sausages on an open fire.
Denise fills the table with casseroles of coq au vin and baeckeoffee, Alsatian wine and sweets.
How alike they are, I think, brother and sister, same deep-set green eyes, the magnetic power of her stare,
a commanding energy, every gesture and movement the same—the way she folds her hands near her face when she begins to speak.
I think of her wedding photo on the steps of the Strasbourg cathedral, facing out at the world as if
the power of youth and remarkable beauty might not just be a loan that always comes due.
But here we are a life time later, surrounded by three generations, grown children and their children,
the evening sun soon to set in the windy part of the garden. The summer air heavy with lavender.
We will have three days with them. Frederic will play the mandolin at the breakfast table—as when a boy.
They will say he how much he looks like papa now. We will walk L’Orangerie Parc together,
childhood Sundays relived, where storks still nest on sky poles, the botanical gardens marvelously overgrown.
We will visit the family cemetery together, brother and sister crushed and tethered again by loss.
We will see blooming hyacinths and wood violets spreading around the names of their parents, Adele & Jean-Luc,
his sister’s young boy, the others. There will be a long silent mourning facing the open summer sky.
Then all too soon the whole family will pile into their car and follow us for miles on the freeway wildly waving
as we part heading south. We cannot know that in a matter of weeks, both Denise and her Jean-Claude,
after fifty years together, will suddenly fail-- no warning, that I will be given their mother’s silver locket,
the one she wore all her life with photos of the two children together close to her heart, now to mine.
The silver maples will shed their leaves, the yellow falling and falling in the garden, the sprawl of
dying blossoms blanketing ground will go unnoticed into winter’s inevitable, inestimable count.
