Marriage Advice. From a Gardenia.
One of my music students once asked me about heaven. She was about five and had the look of a sprite who’d wandered straight out of an enchanted forest. I told her I didn’t know much about it—but I was certain I knew what it smelled like.
She scrunched up her tiny face, narrowed her dark eyes, and said, “You know what heaven smells like?”
I assured her I did. I led her to the side of my house where the gardenia was blooming, plucked a blossom, and told her to hold it close and breathe in as deeply as she could. She did. Her eyes grew wide. “Is that what heaven smells like?” she whispered.
And in all my gypsy wisdom, I said, “I’m certain of it.”
I grew up with the scent of gardenia and wisteria and magnolia and hot red clay soaking the air. It’s a dark scent that makes one wonder if Mother Earth didn’t just wake up on a summer morning in Georgia and decide to drown herself in too much perfume. Even the petals of those aromatic plants are like running your fingers across the finest velvets and satins, accessorized by elegant pistils, dark glossy leaves and wispy vines. And the soil—burnt-sunset red—roots it all in an ancient rust born of damp heat and crumbling rock. Mother Earth is a maven, a divine diva in the southern summer—Sunday-dressed and sitting on the front pew, saying Amen to everything the preacher has to say.
My aunt had gardenia hedges that lined the walkway to her house and when I visited, I’d walk slowly through them, inhaling the simmering buttered aroma of heaven.
When I moved to northern Virginia I was told gardenias had to be grown inside. I found the idea absurd, but I tried. And I killed more potted gardenias than I care to count.
Three years ago (and after two decades of being a gardenia serial killer), I happened to be at a local nursery and I came across a hybrid gardenia bush that could withstand Virginia winters. I took a leap of faith and planted it on the southern corner of my suburban lot. It isn’t the six foot hedge my aunt boasted, but it thrives, gifting me with gardenia blooms through the summer.
So last week I picked one of the blossoms and brought it into the house, slipping it into a small, slender neck vase I keep on the kitchen windowsill. It’s plant medicine–I pick it up and smell it off and on throughout the day.
And that’s when my husband said the strangest thing: “It’s so weird that you have that gardenia bush outside.”
Now. After decades of marriage, I know most of his stories. I knew his mother, whom he adored, had a grand gardenia in their dining room that she tended like royalty. It belonged beside the long cherry-wood table that seated twelve when fully extended. Its stately nature complimented the feminine elegance of her china and silver place settings. For him, the scent of gardenias is braided into those memories, just as it is with my own childhood. But he’d never remarked on the gardenia quite that way.
I thought it was the oddest thing that my gardenia bush, which I’ve now had for three years, confused him. For me, the gardenia was finally making sense again. So I asked him what was weird about it and he replied, “Gardenias grow inside.”
I assured him they did not. Gardenias, like the sun itself, belonged outside under the summer sky. He, in turn, asserted that gardenias were indoor potted plants that needed careful tending near big windows.
I stared at him. It had never occurred to me that we had two significantly different experiences (and therefore two significantly different understandings) of this one creamy soft flower. His gardenias lived in climate-controlled dining rooms by tall windows; mine grew wild in the heat. But what was most striking to me was that, despite our nearly opposite childhood experiences, we both had deep memory roots attached to it.
Now. Perhaps the whole thing wouldn’t be worth writing about except that a few days later, we were at odds over the bedroom curtains—open or closed at night. I love the moonlight; he can’t sleep with it. We were two people wanting the same thing—a good night’s rest—coming at it from different angles.
In my frustration, I spoke harshly to him and then went out to sit on the back porch with a cup of coffee and commiserate with the birds. As I sat there, I got to thinking about that gardenia. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was operating through the lens of his experiences, and I was operating through the lens of mine. All to end up in the same place.
The scent of the gardenia. The fragile, fleeting beauty of its velvet petals.
He joined me a few minutes later, sat down beside me, and stole a sip of my coffee. I smiled at him and said, “It’s so funny to me how you think the gardenia is an indoor plant.”
He gave me that look—half suspicion, half amusement. I nudged his shoulder. “They’re not, you know. They’re meant to be outdoors. In the sun.”
He grinned, shook his head, and said, “No, they’re not. My mom loved hers in the dining room. It’s weird having one outside.”
We sat a bit longer. We negotiated the curtain situation and came to a mutually satisfying agreement.
Occasionally, I am in awe of the lessons we still have to learn. The way life continues to teach us in the smallest ways. That we can know something for so long and then one day, something small happens like a stray comment, and if you care to be curious, you can come to a deeper understanding of a person or an idea.
Because if a single flower can hold two entirely different stories, how much more must every person we love?
How much gentler might we be—if we remembered to ask?
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