Seasons of Wisdom

I am entering a contest sponsored locally here. This is the second-round version of an essay inspired by an oil painting of two large hibiscus blooms. Comment away!
*********************************************

It’s almost time.

After the final winter freeze has laid its icy blanket upon the ground, I’ll impatiently watch rows of flawlessly aligned seeds shoot up to present their annual flowering performances like an organic version of Las Vegas showgirls. The days will lengthen, a garden pot will appear on the stoop, and I’ll discover more about the workings of life.

I moved in next door to Ms. June seven years ago on a chilly fall day – the kind of day when a jacket isn’t quite enough to keep one warm. She and I spent the winter months exchanging simple neighborly greetings and smiles as we passed each other on the street or scraped frost from the frozen windshields of our cars.

Spring came and blended with signs of the coming summer, the days still short on humidity. I stepped outside one Saturday afternoon, and my eyes caught sight of a bulky, nondescript garden pot newly situated between Ms. June’s stoop and my own. The vessel held a woody plant with sturdy green leaves and deep pink buds like fuchsia lipsticks half-turned up from their bright green tubes. A hibiscus, I beamed – my favorite summer foliage.

I stood eyeing the flourishing plant as Ms. June, in pedal pushers and a t-shirt picturing a sleeping kitten, emerged through a screen door. As she knelt and turned the soil of her flowerbed with a hand spade, she spoke of the care a hibiscus required indoors until the season was right to bring it outside. The chat turned to her black plastic trays of mottled annuals, the stockpile of plants in her extra bedroom, and then – somewhere between the begonias and impatiens - to life.

Our conversation has never ended.

Over six summers of Ms. June’s eternally-thriving hibiscus, we’ve cultivated a relationship, like that of a mentor and a protégé. Sometimes Ms. June’s lessons for me come as simple thoughts. Strawberries aren’t good this week. Kirkwood Farmer’s Market has the best pies. The war has gone on too long. Other times her teaching is more spiritual. A parent’s love endures even when a child’s does not. The loss of two husbands and a son is soul-rattling, but survivable. Surely God exists.

The current temperature is a glacial 22 degrees. I anxiously mark red X’s across my calendar as winter draws to a close. My seventh summer learning across Ms. June’s hibiscus is imminent. I eagerly anticipate the return of the pot and the humid nights I will spend on the stoop with Ms. June in whisps of citronella smoke, swatting mosquitoes. I have much to learn, yet I’m acutely aware that our front-stoop talks may be numbered. Just as a bright hibiscus bloom withers away when summer fades, so does one’s lifetime.

Then again, my other neighbor has seen 95 summers. And the thriving hibiscus? Well, it could live another 40 years.