Magnolia Bloom Quotes

Like the magnolia tree, She bends with the wind, Trials and tribulation may weather her, Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms, See her standing there, like steel, With her roots forever buried, Deep in her Southern soil.

You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.

I am merely at the midway point in the novel of my own life. On around page 250 of a 500-page tale and, given future medical advances, maybe even 200. There’s no reason why the next 250, 300, or even 350 pages will not be far more exciting than the first half.

A hundred years from now, folks will look back at this time period and think, Wow, what an incredible moment it must’ve been to be alive. Syrian refugees, human trafficking, climate change—the whole world is out there waiting to be saved. And you’ll have a grand adventure doing it, even if only in what you consider a small, locally based way. You know, you already have as a teacher.

I don’t mind you pouring lemonade or whatever on us, but as soon as you hit a woman, I get mad. And that’s one show you don’t want the curtains to go up on.

She was part of a group that helped tilt the world just a tiny bit the right way. Yes, she, one tiny person, was part of it. Hardly noticeable, true, but “hardly” was more than nothing. “Hardly” made all the difference in the world in how she saw herself.

Most people didn’t see the beauty behind the everyday, didn’t enjoy the simple pleasures in life, didn’t stop and smell the roses … and just because these phrases were considered platitudes didn’t make them any less true. For you could belittle truth, lambaste it, deny its existence, but truth would always still be there, as unconcerned as the inexorably flowing Mississippi.

The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed. The flowers that died would bloom again another year, the same birds build their nests, the same trees blossom. That old quiet moss smell would linger in the air, and the bees would come, and crickets, the herons build their nests in the deep dark woods. The butterflies would dance their merry jug across the lawns, and spiders spin foggy webs, and small startled rabbits who had no business to come trespassing poke their faces through the crowded shrubs. There would be lilac, and honeysuckle still, and the white magnolia buds unfolding slow and tight beneath the dining-room window. No one would ever hurt Manderley. It would lie always in its hollow like an enchanted thing, guarded by the woods, safe, secure, while the sea broke and ran and came again in the little shingle bays below.

I’ve always loved magnolia trees and their blooms—there’s something so beautiful about a magnolia blossom. It demands attention, and you can’t help but love those big, creamy petals and that fragrant smell.

John knew the best love stories were the ones that were never told. For no medium—no book, no poem, no play or movie—could ever tell a love story in its entirety, its full span and depth, from the exhilarating beginning to the tragic ending of all love stories. He didn’t mind if his life was forgotten—it had never occurred to him to want to be remembered—as long as he had truly lived, and to live life without experiencing one great love story was to not live at all.

Inside her mind, she felt increasingly adrift, as if their lovemaking had reached a realm that transcended the physical body. She saw herself float above her body, past her ceiling, through her roof, and higher and higher, the entire world pulsating and alive with sensations. Even these receded as she floated above her town, the pinpoints of the shop windows and car headlights downtown, then she was even higher, above the mighty Mississippi.

I am merely at the midway point in the novel of my own life. On around page 250 of a 500-page tale, maybe even 200. There’s no reason why the next 250, 300, or even 350 pages will not be far more exciting than the first half.

Except those images weren’t exact captures of reality. No, the Camera Eye was also suffused with what photographers called the Golden Hour—the gilt-tinted hour following sunrise and preceding sunset, when the world was awash with russet rays and even the meanest streets were aglow as if in an Arthurian legend. Every moment spent with John was like that, reality beyond reality. Richer, realer, rawer than reality. These were the moments she remembered most.

As she drove, she surprised herself with a sudden laugh. How blind, infinitely blind, she had been to think that men’s inability to see her forty-eight-year-old self was a regret or, worse, a failing on her own part. No, what it really was was a blessing, for that inability had separated the wheat from the chaff. The spotlight was indeed always there but only for someone perceptive enough, brave enough, mature enough to see it still shining above her head.

Folks don’t give themselves enough credit. The mother who endures cavities so her children can get braces. The father who works a dead-end job so his kids can have a roof over their heads. The daughter who sacrifices college so she can take care of her disabled mother. They are all heroes, and don’t you believe otherwise.

This has been her life for the past fifty years, this striving to help save the world a little bit, to push it just a bit farther into the right. This action was the only thing that sustained her during the hard times [when] only her purposeful life propped her up from total collapse, and she thought how strange that she had taught the morality play Everyman all those years but didn’t fully understand its central lesson or how true it was: We are our good deeds, and they alone will come with us into the afterlife.

Self-pity, in a world of famine and war, is an obscene self-indulgence.

After vindictive winter, apple blossoms seem all the more heaven-sent. Among flashing forsythia and budding rose, dogwood and daffodil, The allure of magnolia, azalea and wisteria to lovers’ dreams are lent. Resolve is recompense as seedtime’s blush dispenses with the chill, How sweet-scented is New England now as winter tempests are through. My darling girl, the divinest bloom in cherry blossom time just happens to be you.

I’m in love, aren’t I? She thought she knew the answer by how much she wanted to be there. Wouldn’t have traded being there for any other location in the world. Wouldn’t have traded it for all the exotic destinations flaunted in Pan Am travel brochures. Not Tahiti, not Monte Carlo, not Hong Kong. No, she wanted to be here, in this ramshackle market not a ten-minute drive from her humdrum house and life. Except it wasn’t a humdrum life anymore, was it? No, I’m at the most exciting place on Earth. The center of the world. The Roman Forum during the reign of Augustus Caesar.

He tried to live a good life and devote that life to helping others, but he never thought the world would reward him for his efforts. Such a thought would be the ultimate in self-deluding self-aggrandizement, for why would the world care one iota about him? Now, however, he wondered if he had been wrong. Now, he thought that maybe, just maybe, if you lived a good life, the universe—this cold, cold world—might just reward you. And he did feel rewarded—rewarded beyond all the gold in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

There is no end to that kind of love, even if the lovers’ bodies ceased to exist in this world. No, that love is manifested everywhere else, in a million other couples worldwide, and probably a few not far from where I am driving, up the 405 freeway, through a world I thought I knew but admit that I don’t know at all.

She was beautiful. Not despite her so-called flaws but because of them—those scrapes and life experiences that made her body like no other woman’s. The beauty that wasn’t ephemeral or society-dictated but the real beauty that cut across generations, across all cultures, from the beginning of humankind. The beauty that was painted in Paleolithic caves and carved in ancient Venus statuettes, those wonderful figurines of all shapes and sizes, individualized and gorgeous precisely because of that individuality. What cavemen had known, modern men had forgotten, and sadly, modern women too.

The spotlight hadn’t dimmed as Molly aged but had changed its glow instead. It had grown more intense with each new experience, had become more personalized and distinguished. It was no longer the bland whitish light of youth, a light dictated by a ceaselessly shallow society and therefore able to be seen by everyone in such a society. No, hers at present was a spotlight with highly individualized rays that could no longer be seen by most men simply because most men’s eyes weren’t good enough to see them.

It was an overcast day, but the cloudy weather did not detract from the signs of spring that were evident all around them. It was the second week in March, and the official start of the season was just a couple of weeks away. The magnolia trees had already bloomed, and tulips, daffodils, and wildflowers were shooting up all around the convent's gardens.

The goddess of sex that most men had fantasized about since their teenage years wasn’t to be found in some red-light district of town or in an illicit magazine but was actually standing right next to them at work, at the library, at the coffee shop. And they were too blind to see it!

Folks don’t give themselves enough credit. The mother who endures cavities so her children can get braces. The father who works a dead-end job so his kids can have a roof over their heads. The daughter who sacrifices college so she can take care of her disabled mother. They are all heroes.

She was part of a group that helped tilt the world just a tiny bit the right way. Hardly noticeable, true, but “hardly” was more than nothing. “Hardly” made all the difference in the world in how she saw herself.

Oh my. Molly put her hand to her no-doubt agape mouth. Oh my, oh my, oh my. After her divorce, she hadn’t thought this day would ever come again, but here it was, a second proposal. Life is funny, she thought, and she felt herself step back from the reality of her situation for a moment, lest its emotions overwhelm her and make her swoon like a damsel in those Middle English chivalric romances she taught in 10th-grade English. Yes, life was indeed funny. It had no syllabus, which was why Molly, always a diligent student, felt so unprepared for it. Life played tricks on you too, surprised you, with the biggest surprise that life, even at the nearly half-century mark, could still hold surprises. Like so: There is a man in my kitchen, a man I’m in love with, and he wants to spend the rest of his life with me. How strange and how very unconventional by its conventional, everyday setting.

This striving to help save the world a little bit, to push it just a bit farther into the right—this action was the only thing that sustained her during the hard times [when] only her purposeful life propped her up from total collapse, and she thought how strange that she had taught the morality play Everyman all those years but didn’t fully understand its central lesson or how true it was: We are our good deeds, and they alone will come with us into the afterlife.

To fight against these falsehoods, though, one needed to be able to see past the present-day and very male-oriented distortion lens to the underlying truth. Beyond question, Molly Valle could do this. A woman whose surface appearance, eyeglasses and conservative clothes, fit the schoolmarm stereotype to a T. Yet she had sloughed off that exterior and society’s restrictions as effortlessly as she had her clothes, and during their lovemaking, she had not only kept up with him but often passed ahead of him. With other women, he had seen the embers of passion but never the flame. Tonight, he had witnessed the bonfire.

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist--holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew--moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.

In his lifetime, he had seen enough injustice to know the world was cold and remorseless and didn’t care one fig about the happiness of people. He tried to live a good life and devote that life to helping others, but he never thought the world would reward him for his efforts. Such a thought would be the ultimate in self-deluding self-aggrandizement, for why would the world care one iota about him?

Intellectually, she recognized the summer could’ve lasted only so many days, but, in remembrance, it seemed to last epochs, from the creation of the Milky Way to its expiration. Not because the time was dull but rather it was so damn fun and so life-affirming, it could’ve been a magical potion concocted to revive the dead. Even in her advanced age, she could see that time, so clearly delineated in what the novelist John Dos Passos called the Camera Eye—mental snapshots, frozen in bliss, which neither age nor time could mar their perfection.

For as Molly looked at him, she felt an immediate … she didn’t know what. Despite her love of the language arts, she also possessed an analytic mind, and that mind straightaway tried to seek out the why. And it couldn’t unearth the reason apart from his smile. Or, rather, how he smiled at her—warm and full-armed, like the embrace from a long-absent friend, without the slightest trace of fakeness or concealed motive. His was the most open face she’d ever seen in her life. Concomitant with these sensations, all delivered within a split second, was a thought, seemingly originating not in her mind but from the center of her torso and radiating out to the ends of each nerve, inexplicable in its suddenness and surety. A thought that children and very young people might have, but never middle-aged adults, especially one with a divorce behind her and the conviction that she already knew the world and what it was able to offer. But there it was, undeniably, the thought: I’m on a great adventure.

Molly wondered this: Could the size of man’s soul be small? She marveled that she would ask herself this question, for the obvious answer was yes. After all, if John’s was infinitely large, then his polar opposite must also surely exist. Her ex-husband’s soul was very small indeed. He was forever spinning his wheels to enlarge his soul, to fill its emptiness, with things. The luxury car, the large house, the high-paying but unimaginative job, the respect of people he didn’t even like. Like so many men, he needed a boy’s toy box of things to feel whole. John was the opposite. He didn’t need anything to feel whole besides a hammock, a beer, and her.

For the people of her town—and she would guess the vast majority of humanity—observed the world not with their minds and imagination but solely with their eyes, which was a severe limitation.

I am merely at the midway point in the novel of my own life. On around page 250 of a 500-page tale. There’s no reason why the next 250, 300, or even 350 pages will not be far more exciting than the first half.

You are a beautiful created daughter of the same God who created sunsets, blooming magnolias, mountain peaks, and sweet summer fruit. You are not an accident or a mistake. God made you with a beautiful purpose in mind,

Falling out of love is a lot harder than falling in love. When you fall in love, everything is beautiful—flowers bloom, music plays, and every star in the sky is winking at you. But falling out of love is like finding yourself in a pitch-black tunnel. At first you think in time you’ll get through it, and then you realize how terribly long the tunnel is. I’m starting to see pinpricks of light ahead, so I might be coming to the end, but I’m not there yet.

People gave up too soon on dreams and hope, but both were there, if you kept your eyes open. With that truth in mind, she returned to the world only to find her own eyes were so tear-filled, she might as well have been submerged fifty feet underwater. “Yes, I will marry you, John,” she heard herself say. “Of course, I will. You kidding me?” She laughed and wiped her eyes, no longer fifty feet underwater but skimming the surface of a great, churning sea. John reached up and kissed her, and they stayed like that for a minute, a month, a millennium.

The storyline for this book bloomed from there, although there is no evidence the two women ever crossed paths. In all of my books, I like to layer a fictional story over the scaffolding of historical facts, and then parse out the inspiration for the plot and characters in the Author’s Note,

She looked at his face, his lined, well-lived face. You were right. This perfect moment, in her once-desolate bedroom, was John’s belief at its apotheosis. She realized she wouldn’t have believed it before—that, in the most hopelessly constricted of places, you could find the fulfillment to all your dreams of adventure and romance. No, she wouldn’t have believed it. Not twenty years ago, not ten years ago, not a year ago. She had to reach forty-eight years of age to realize the truth and to internalize it. Forty-eight long years of groping in the dark. How silly she felt now and how blessed.

Robert Frost wrote about “two roads diverg[ing] in a wood” and taking “the one less traveled.” But, in Molly’s case, both roads continued on to equally devastating destinations, even if the specifics were different. Which of the two paths would you choose if one went off a cliff and the other into quicksand?

He had envisioned each contour and line of her face, the spellbinding individuality of personal detail. Here was a woman who had lived, and that life had been kind and good. And within that goodness lay true glamour, which was far more than the sum of ephemeral, physical parts. That was why, even attired in an unpretentious house dress, her forty-eight-year-old face scarcely made up, Molly was glamorous in a way that put in the shade women half her age and on the cover of fashion magazines.

Soon, John would wake up and leave her, at least for the day, to right one injustice in a world chockful of injustices. In imagining his day, Molly understood what she was going to do for the rest of her life. The world was so wrong, so disastrously cruel, and in so many ways, it became clear to her that she would try to right it somehow, even in the minuscule measure that a single human being could influence. . . . She even had a partner in crime, a man whose wonderful mysteries she would also need a lifetime to unravel, and she was so looking forward to this task.

She had always thought history was made up of grand gestures, as recent, momentous events seem to demonstrate. The British Prime Minister kowtowing to the Nazi Fuehrer at Munich, the quarter-million troops landing on D-Day, the two atomic bombs that ended World War II. But now she knew better. History could be judged grand even if the event was, on the surface, small. For here, right in front of her, was history in the flesh, history that would be immortalized in print and film. The city council and mayor had surrendered, and evidently so had the biggest department store in town.

John never felt the insecurity that underlay the surfaces of most men, and in his mind, he could easily conjure up those male colleagues of hers. In the teachers’ lounge, in their stiff suits with their bow-tied collars, their nicotine-yellowed fingers holding up their pretentious pipes, eyeing Molly as she came in, then snickering when she went out, dismissing her not because she didn’t know enough but because she knew too much, indeed knew far more than they did, and they were cognizant of and frightened by this fact. Hence, the dismissal and, concomitantly, the figurative puffing out of their chests, like those of exotic birds whose impressive plumage hid the scrawny bodies beneath.

He realized that his past life, his past lonely life, hadn’t been good but perfect. For every single event in that life had pushed him unwaveringly closer and closer to her. Every failure, every crumbling relationship, every breakup in the cold rain or amidst hot tears—everything had been to place him at that diner two weeks ago. To bring him to the now—sleeping on her bed, this stunning, intelligent woman next to him. All his life, he had dreamt of her, either consciously or subconsciously, and this woman had materialized in the flesh. Looking back, he wondered if the plan had been too perfect for it to be mere coincidence. Fate or whatever could substitute for fate had slowly moved him toward her.

But the crown jewel was the columned Greek Revival mansion, which dated from the mid-1800s, along with the manicured boxwood gardens that would serve as the backdrop for the couple's ceremony. Of course, everything was not only very traditional but also a standard to what one might imagine an over-the-top Southern wedding to be. As I said, "Steel Magnolias on steroids." The ceremony would take place outdoors in the garden, but large custom peach-and-white scalloped umbrellas were placed throughout the rows of bamboo folding chairs to shade the guests. Magnolia blossoms and vintage lace adorned the ends of the aisles. White, trellis-covered bars flanked the entrance to the gardens where guests could select from a cucumber cooler or spiked sweet tea to keep cool during the thirty-minute nuptials. It was still considered spring, but like Dallas, Nashville could heat up early in the year, and we were glad to be prepared. By the time we arrived the tent was well on its way to completion, and rental deliveries were rolling in. The reception structure was located past the gardens near the enormous whitewashed former stable, and inside the ceiling was draped in countless yards of peach fabric with crystal chandeliers hanging above every dining table. Custom napkins with embroidered magnolias on them complemented the centerpieces' peach garden roses, lush greenery, and dried cotton stems. Cedric's carpentry department created floor-to-ceiling lattice walls covered in faux greenery and white wisteria blooms, a dreamy backdrop for the band.

STAINS With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze. Her teeth, the keys of a piano. I play her grinning ivory notes with cadenced fumbling fingers, splattered with paint, textured with scars. A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me. My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years. The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun. A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye. For there is no truth in spoken farewells. I am pregnant with a poem, my life lost in its stanzas. My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name: Brenda. I lick the teeth of my piano mouth. With a painter’s hands, with a writer’s hands with rusty wrinkled hands, with hands soaked in the joys, the sorrows, the spills of my mother’s life, I pick up eighty-one years of stains And pull her dress over my head. Her stains look good on me.

I think it’s important to reiterate here that I didn’t start out wanting to be a gardener, or a designer for that matter. It was all trial and error and figuring things out. And sometimes you’ve got to try something outside of your comfort zone to figure out what it is that you truly love. Well, you could say that about you and me right from the start. You were never looking for the loud guy, and I certainly wasn’t looking for the quiet girl. Now I look back and go, “If I would’ve ended up with that quiet guy or that stable guy or that safe guy, I would never have been able to pursue any of these dreams, because no one would have pushed me to these new places I discovered in myself.” Those other types of guys might have allowed me to stay in that safe place. They wouldn’t have drawn you out. That’s interesting. And if I had wound up with some cheerleader who was always the life of the party, I don’t think I would have found my way, either. I needed you for that. Nowadays when I think about the name Magnolia, I think about it in terms that refer to much more than the blossoming of our business. I think about the buds on the three, and how they really are just the tightest buds--they look like rocks, almost. And I feel like when Chip and I met, that tight little bud was me. I was risk averse, and in some ways, I don’t think I saw the beauty or the potential in myself. Then I wound up with Chip Gaines and-- You bloomed? I did. If I hadn’t married Chip, I might not have ever bloomed. I can’t imagine what my life would be if we hadn’t traveled this road. We celebrated our twelfth anniversary recently, and my dad said something that I thought was really beautiful. He said, “Chip, I always thought, when I was out on the baseball field hitting you those grounders, that I was training you to be the next greatest baseball player. But now, looking back and seeing the person you’ve become, I was really training you to be the next greatest dad.

Sugar Magnolia, spoil blooming, eyes all empty and I don't care/ Saw my baby down by the river, could smell her sweet stench waft through the air/

People in town said that if you stood beneath the magnolia, your beloved would come to you, no matter the season or the time, and when its flowers bloomed those who passed by became confused, imagining there had been snow in May, or that stars had fallen from the sky.

A minute after Bethanee had disappeared into the back, John emerged. Gorgeous, damp-haired John in his form-fitting denims. The Marlboro Man minus the nicotine-stained fingers and, admittedly, the thirty-inch waist.

No, life has no soundtrack, just the daily grind occasionally alleviated by short-lived bursts of happiness—a vacation, the birth of a child, retirement. This is my life and the life of everyone I know—all my friends, all my family members, everyone with whom I have more than a passing acquaintance. I’ve spent nearly forty-five years on this planet, and the majority of those years—my adult years, my reality-based years—have shown me that the adventure Molly and John had no longer exists. This is why I so want Molly to wake up and tell me that I’m wrong.

That was Sunday, June 5th, 2016—two years, ten months, and seventeen days ago. The next morning, Monday, June 6th, 2016, she began telling me the second story, the one that you have in front of you now. The story that changed my life and, if I were to wager a gentleman’s bet, maybe change yours too.

Of course, I know the answer. I went into teaching as a stepping stone to my writing career, and when that fizzled and died, I was cut adrift and so very resentful. How does that John Lennon song go? “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” That was me. I was so angry and frustrated by my failed writing ambitions, I couldn’t see my life as a teacher being fulfilling in its own right. I missed it—but now I see it.

Her time with John, brief though it was, showed her that love and adventure are very much real. They are not only the fantasies conjured up by writers, musicians, and filmmakers. They exist in the real world. Magic exists—a two-word phrase that, before her forty-eight-year-old self met John, she would’ve considered the ultimate in naiveté and self-delusion.

Molly wanted to hug the young girl close, stroke her black hair and tell her that loneliness, while unpleasant, was endurable. Not once, though, did she consider telling the girl that she was wrong for that reassurance would be a lie, wouldn’t it be? She was, after all, her, and in the intervening four decades, the girl’s prescience had been proven right. Loneliness had indeed been the condition—would always be the condition—of Molly’s life, of being misunderstood and neglected by others, even amidst a crowd and friends and, for a few years, a husband.

The woman turned to him, and he observed she was someone his own age or a bit younger. Dark, wavy hair and large brown eyes behind schoolmarm glasses. A friendly, olive-complected face. Not stereotypically Southern, if there was such a thing. Greek or Spanish maybe. He wasn’t sure. What he did know was that he felt something then. Something that was shapeless and intangible, but neither quality made it—whatever it was—any less there. It was a shifting of his senses or maybe even of reality itself. You turned a corner and a stunning landscape presented itself, and though you yourself had not changed, everything else had for, after you’d seen this new thing, whatever this thing was, you automatically understood the mechanisms of life could not go back to where they had been before. The sight—though it could more properly be called an experience, encompassing all five senses and even ones not yet discovered—rendered everything before it monochrome and matte. John Pressman had only felt this way twice before in his life with a woman, and this time, he felt it at fifty years, four months, and twenty-three days of age. At a greasy spoon in a small town in Mississippi in the summer of 1961.

She looked at his face, his lined, well-lived face. You were right. This perfect moment, in her once-desolate bedroom, was his belief at its apotheosis. She realized she wouldn’t have believed it before—that, in the most hopelessly constricted of places, you could find the fulfillment to all your dreams of adventure and romance.

Love is manifested everywhere else, in a million other couples worldwide, and probably a few not far from where I am driving, up the freeway, through a world I thought I knew but admit that I don’t know at all.

He walked beside her, in front of her, behind her. He tried not to be overwhelmed by her fragrance and sheer presence. Yet, beyond the near-overwhelming desire for Molly Valle, he felt something else. It was as if the hands of some internal clock had long been off-kilter and had, at last, rearranged themselves into the correct positions.

She wouldn’t have traded being there for any other location in the world. Wouldn’t have traded it for all the exotic destinations flaunted in Pan Am travel brochures. Not Tahiti, not Monte Carlo, not Hong Kong. No, she wanted to be here, in this ramshackle market not a ten-minute drive from her humdrum house and life. Except it wasn’t a humdrum life anymore, was it? No, I’m at the most exciting place on Earth. The center of the world. The Roman Forum during the reign of Augustus Caesar. “Let’s explore more,” John said after he deposited a head of broccoli into the cart.

Love is eternal . . . There is no end to that kind of love, even if the lovers’ bodies ceased to exist. That love is manifested everywhere else, in a million other couples worldwide, and probably a few not far from where I am driving, up the freeway, through a world I thought I knew but admit that I don’t know at all.

YOU MUST NEVER SLEEP UNDER A MAGNOLIA when the tree begins to flower like a glimpse of Flesh when the flower begins to smell as if its roots have reached the layer of Thirst upon the unsealed jar of Joy Alice, you should never sleep under so much pure pale so many shriek-mouthed blooms as if Patience had run out of Patience

In spring, streams gush with frigid waters, and inspired songbirds wake before dawn. Trees come alive with buds that swell and crack open; cherry blossoms, magnolias, and dogwoods seek rays of sunlight that will coax them into full bloom. Green tips poke up from between the crumbling dried leaves of last fall, and the days slowly, slowly grow longer before evening darkness envelopes the subtly bustling earth. Your sleepy senses wake in tandem with spring, and your body craves new sensations.

Sugar had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina: possibly the most luscious of the world's garden cities. Behind every wrought-iron gate or exposed-brick wall in the picturesque peninsula blooming between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers lay a sweet-scented treasure trove of camellias, roses, gardenias, magnolias, tea olives, azaleas and jasmine, everywhere, jasmine. With its lush greenery, opulent vines, sumptuous hedgerows and candy-colored window boxes, it was no wonder the city's native sons and daughters believed it to be the most beautiful place on earth. In her first years of exile Sugar had tried to cultivate a reminder of the luxuriant garden delights she had left behind, struggling in sometimes hostile elements to train reluctant honeysuckle and sulky sweet potato vines or nurture creeping jenny and autumn stonecrop.

The magnolia tree loomed vast over the house, its branches full of white blooms, like a hundred miniature reflections of the moon, and their thick, sweet scent hung over the veranda languorously, the scent that was an enchantment luring you out into the mysterious, moonlit countryside.

Cammie

Nature is infinitely patient, one thing lives after another has given way; the magnolia's blooms die just as the cherry's come to life.

Nina and Sophie were seated at a large round table settled under the branches of a blooming magnolia. The rich scent of the flowers mixed with the incredible food Jasmine and her team had whipped up had built an almost intoxicating aroma. They started off with sesame Halloumi and sweet potato tahini mash, followed by butternut squash and sage risotto, then there were hearty mushroom steaks with a side of roasted eggplant and miso salsa as their main. As they ate, she tasted the flavors from the earth, celebrating the gardens and passionate people around them. Her friend had harnessed the surroundings and created a rich culinary experience for the event.

I imagine his landscaping this property like a maestro, arranging the magnolias and the forsythia beneath them to announce the beginning of spring. After a long gray winter, these first pink and yellow blooms shout, “Something’s happening!” By May they’ll have gone green with the rest of the yard, a quiet before the peonies and hydrangea bloom.

There are situations considered "not fit for children." Many I know grew up with these situations. Eight-year-olds with the Sheriff's Office number memorized. Southernness is raking up countless bags of Magnolia leaves knowing you'll eventually get a few blooms.

AFTER OPENING THE NEW YORK TIMES I WONDER HOW TO WRITE A POEM ABOUT LOVE To love like God can love, sometimes. before the kettle boils to a whistle, quiet. Quiet that is lost on me, waiting as I am for an alarm. The sort of things I notice: the bay over redbud blossoms, mountains over magnolia blooms. There is always something starting somewhere, and I have lost ambition to look into the details. Shame fits comfortably as my best skirt, and what can I do but walkaround in that habit? Turn the page. Turn another page. This was meant to be about love. Now there is nothing left but this.

How there's no going back to whatever version of me existed before ... I read Marguerite Duras's account of a river and its current, a girl, a lover, a mother, of memory's weakness for women and gold lame heels. Or when I was woken up by the news and this planet's despairing chorus-how it dislocates the heart and coaxes cynics and makes a mass out of individuals. Or whatever version of me existed before I met that boy whom I loved for one winter and well into spring, when the magnolias in early bloom looked not just pink but elaborate, ambient, and grand, like my insides were seeable-flowering so forcefully, like nature cautioning me: Durga, this won't last.

Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies,” Yusef Salaam’s mother reminded readers of the Amsterdam News.

Love Worn In a tavern on the Southside of Chicago a man sits with his wife. From their corner booth each stares at strangers just beyond the other's shoulder, nodding to the songs of their youth. Tonight they will not fight. Thirty years of marriage sits between them like a bomb. The woman shifts then rubs her right wrist as the man recalls the day when they sat on the porch of her parents' home. Even then he could feel the absence of something desired or planned. There was the smell of a freshly tarred driveway, the slow heat, him offering his future to folks he did not know. And there was the blooming magnolia tree in the distance— its oversized petals like those on the woman's dress, making her belly even larger, her hands disappearing into the folds. When the last neighbor or friend leaves their booth he stares at her hands, which are now closer to his, remembers that there had always been some joy. Leaning closer, he believes he can see their daughter in her eyes

You bloomed? I did. If I hadn’t married Chip, I might not have ever bloomed.