Observation #3: Chicory

On seasons, blooming, and change.

I have never been good with change. When I have been very happy—and I have been very happy many times—I have always thought: I wish it could always be like this.

But if it had always stayed like that, as it was then, then I could not have this. 

And if I did not know this—

If I could never know this—

Drive north of New York City from April to June, upstate or to the Berkshires or to Vermont, and once you get off the highway, you’ll see a profusion of pink and white flowers, bright as candy, growing at the edge of the woods. Last year, the first time I drove to Bennington, steering a shiny black rental car as wide as a boat, I kept noticing the flowers, pink and white, white and pink. I saw them again this April, on a trip upstate, the lush pockets of roadside flowers seeming to signal the start of spring. I looked them up: Hesperis matronalis, also known as dame’s rocket, damask-violet, night-scented gilliflower, mother-of-the-evening. 

I was happy to see the pink and white flowers last summer, happy to see them again this April, happy once more to see them when I drove up to Vermont in June. But come July, when I went upstate again, the dame’s rocket which I had so loved seeing was gone. In its place were tall stands of wild carrot flowers, patches of brilliant orange daylilies, and—blue, shockingly blue, delicate crepuscular dawning blue—chicory flowers, Cichorium intybus, blue dots dotting the side of the road, as far as I could see.

Cut a bunch of chicory for a bouquet and it will fade by the end of the day, the flowers turning from blue to white, the way the color of the sky lightens approaching the horizon. Leave the flowers and buds on their woody, sparse stems and they’ll bloom through October. The entire plant is edible; its leaves are bitter, served in salads and rechristened as endive or radicchio. The root has long been used as a coffee substitute, though it doesn’t contain caffeine, and in parts of France, chicory is still added to coffee for its flavor. Its petals are straight, nearly rectangular; I know exactly how I’d paint them: dry, with a thin, flat brush. They taper toward the center, with toothed outer edges that make me think of the neat torn edge of a sheet of waxed paper. In European folklore, a chicory flower is said to have been able to open locked doors.

Botanical illustration of chicory from Charles Hall’s ‘Plant-Life’, 1915, via the Mary Evans Picture Library.

Every year during cherry blossom season I grow fearful I’ll miss it, that I won’t get to see the trees in their magnificence, shaggy with white blooms; I spend March already half-missing the sight of them, even as day by day, week by week the buds open, each tree a little different from itself, already in bloom and already fading.¹ I think: peak. I think: if only I could stay here, at the zenith. Every time. But I love seeing the rain of white petals when the cherry blossoms fall, and I love to see the pink petals piled up on the sidewalk, and I love to see the serrated green leaves unfurl, and I love when it gets warm out and everyone changes clothes, just as I love when the air turns crisp in autumn, and I have always said that I could never live in a place without seasons, and seasons are nothing more or less than the passage of time.

My life is changing, now and soon.

How I wanted to stay with the dame’s rocket blooming on the side of the road. How I wanted to stay with the cherry blossoms when I spent a week in Tokyo. How, ten years ago, I wanted to live forever in the attic room with the crabapple tree out front, the crabapple tree that bloomed each spring and blew soft pink petals onto my bed through my open window.

But if I had stayed there I wouldn’t know this—

Right now I feel as though I’m racing through time, racing to meet another version of myself. She is waiting for me in a green field, and soon we will join hands. What I mean is that I’m moving soon, changing nearly everything about the way I live, but my life is already so different now than it was even a year and a half ago. When I think about how I arrived at this choice, I want to find a moment I can point to, some kind of turning point when I chose here and not there, a place where my life swung open like a door, but it wasn’t like that, though it was some kind of opening.

Chicory flowers open and close so regularly you can nearly set your watch by them. The bud blooms early in the morning, beginning before sunrise, opening over the morning hours.² On a sunny day, the flower closes at noon, paling in color and furling shut—on cloudy days, the flowers can stay open through the afternoon. The plant doesn’t blossom all at once, but in individual flower heads, each part of the chicory plant displaying a different state of bloom or decay. Rather than the electric shock and shudder of the cherry blossoms, the chicory is always daily changing, opening and closing, deep blue to periwinkle to white.

I won’t try to draw an extended metaphor here. I just want to tell you about the chicory, which you can still see in bloom as you read this. You’ll find it, woody and tenacious, in parks and parking lots and on the side of the road. By the time fall comes and the weather changes, it will have died back, same as the dame’s rocket, and the snowdrops before that. I want to tell you that nothing is permanent, that no matter how badly we may want to we cannot hold onto an instant, an inch. I have always wanted to crystallize time: that’s why I started writing, to hold onto what I felt slipping away. But I am trying to let go of that, that grasping desire that keeps me from truly apprehending the present.

One more story about chicory. 

When I left Vietnam, earlier this spring, I was heartbroken; I wanted to stay forever in the place that I had already been homesick for since before I was born. But I couldn’t do that, and it wasn’t worth trying to imagine who I could have been if I had always lived there, though that’s not to say I didn’t try. In Vietnam I drank coffee every day, brewed with a phin, hot or iced with condensed milk, and it was that coffee—it was more than the coffee—that I missed when I was back in the states. 

I brought home a bag of Trung Nguyên grounds, picked up at the grocery store in Huế, but the coffee that most Vietnamese immigrants will recognize, the coffee that my mother makes, is the Café du Monde chicory coffee from New Orleans. During the waves of immigration after 1975, many of us ended up on the Gulf Coast, working as shrimpers and on farms. Café du Monde coffee was popular among immigrants for its resemblance to coffees from home, and because it was packed in tins, it was easy to ship and send to friends and family in other states. When I moved to New York, nearly ten years ago, before I knew any of this, or how it would feel, my mother sent me a tin of Café du Monde. It’s a strong dark roast, sweetened and rounded out with chicory root, the root of the plant with those blue flowers, yes, those same blue flowers that grow all along the freeway and in the cracks in the concrete and on the sides of the roads where I have lived and will live. 

The moment of that first this has already become then, but I will do my best to remember this—

Till soon,

LP

1. I made a piece about this feeling, which you can view on your desktop here.

2. You can read a beautiful article, with pictures, about this phenomenon here.