Though one of the things I love about writing this letter series is its closeness and specificity, the luxury to look tightly at one plant, one flower, the truth is that when I become aware of the natural world, it is impossible to ignore how interconnected and dependent we are upon each other. I want to see a free Palestine; I dream of a world in which settler colonialism and genocidal violence do not exist; I grieve for all suffering in Gaza, and for those who are living with pain and fear. I have appreciated the organizing and statements from Jewish Voice for Peace, and if you are able to donate funds, consider the Palestinian American Medical Association’s relief campaign for Gaza hospitals, as well as Doctors Without Borders, which is responding to urgent medical need in Gaza.
I often write about my emotional life in terms of doors and rooms. To face a choice is to look down a hallway, or series of hallways; doors are open or shut.
Sometimes what I need is in another room.
Sometimes, what I’m forgetting is also in another room.
This fall, I’m teaching a graduate seminar in nonfiction literature. I have rarely taught in formal academic settings; this is the first class I’ve taught that runs the length of an entire semester. Because I am unconvinced of my command of a classroom or my ability to speak extemporaneously, I begin every class with a short writing exercise, with which we can settle ourselves, leaving behind the workday to enter the world of words.
Two weeks ago, inspired by an essay by Phoebe Chen, I asked my students to draw, from memory, the floor plan of a place that was meaningful to them. I found looseleaf paper and packs of crayons in the department office, the ones with twenty-four colors, and scattered the materials around the room. The instructions were to draw and then to write about the experience of drawing and remembering.
I don’t normally do the exercises—I use the time, fifteen or twenty minutes, to take attendance and get settled and look over my notes for the day—but I wanted to draw, too, and in my notebook, next to my class planning and notes on the reading, I drew, from memory, the layout of my grandparents’ house in Portland, the house I spent over half my childhood in. But when I say that I drew the layout of the house, what I mean is that I ended up drawing my memory of the garden.
The peony is a perennially blooming flower; perennial means it returns every year. Its leaves are dark green, compound, and deeply lobed, growing on low-laying bushes that I have come to recognize even when not in bloom. Paeonia is native to Asia, Europe, and western North America; during the Middle Ages, when the peony was used for medicine, the plant was often depicted in its autumnal seed-bearing form. But to me it’s the blossoms that make a peony a peony—frilled, showy, the petals cresting and layered, emerging from the deep bowl of the flower.
At the end of winter, a peony bud is so dense and tight, like a marble or a fist, the sap-green sepal and the petals packed in, that it seems as though it could never bloom at all. But come spring, come sun, the petals loosen and unfurl, the body of the flower softening, opening, and then—nearly gaudy in their beauty, excessive, full-throated, languorous and delicate at the same time—by May the peony comes into full bloom.
My grandfather grew peonies in his garden. When I remember them, it is in rows banked along the middle of the garden, where a small path wove through. I remember walking on that path as a child, carrying a plastic milk-jug filled from the hose, helping to water the peonies. They were striated white and pink; and deep burgundy, almost black; and blush-colored, though I don’t think any were red. When the garden was in full bloom we would cut them to make bouquets. We cut without fear or hesitation; they came back every year, the way that peonies do.
When I drew the garden I drew the plants that I could remember. First the fruit trees: the cherry that my cousins and I climbed, the plum tree that bore iridescently blue fruit, the snow pears, the apples and persimmons. Then the mint, the tomatoes, the snapdragons, the hyacinth bush next to the laundry vent, the homey cozy smell of which I loved so much I always stopped to inhale, the honeysuckle and wisteria, and the—and the—
The more I drew, the more I remembered; then came a point where I wasn’t sure if what I was filling the space with had been real or was imagined.
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