Wildflower bloom

"Not a description...an invocation."

I've never actually explained this title. It comes from a poem I wrote for a friend. She was feeling insignificant. I wanted her to realize how much she was worth. I didn't want to swipe Tupac's metaphor of roses growing from concrete; I generalized it into something I could claim as my own. Seeing the grammatical ambiguity of the second word in the phrase, I decided to explain it further with a second sentence. I then had a theme for my future writings. I would use my reflections on my own experiences to encourage others.

Ok, enough Hemingwaying.

* * *

The day after Christmas, I found myself in a people-ridden Los Angeles shopping mall. My sister had jokingly coined it the "brother mall"; most of its patrons were black, and bore the many symbols of their heritage. Much as I resisted, I had to laugh along with her: a shopping mall, the classic symbol of white consumerist culture--a Westfield mall, no less--juxtaposed with its antithesis. Somehow, this notion was bizarre and understandable at the same time. I didn't feel threatened the way I did the one time I stopped in Inglewood years ago; today, nobody glared at me with suspicion. I still felt like an alien. A shopping mall was a familiar place; a shopping mile filled with strangers was not.

I digress. A few days later, while waiting for my sister and her husband to finish up their day at Disneyland, I stopped in the ever-familiar Montebello Town Center mall to kill some time and perhaps get dinner. Window shopping, I found myself in a Bath and Body Works, where they were having their semi-annual sale. The payment line was long enough that it took me 20 minutes to escape with my $3 bottle of night-blooming jasmine shower gel.

* * *

When I was a kid, my sister and I would play in the little playground at the golf club. The setup has since been replaced with a modern collection of bright yellow plastic bridges and slides, childproofed, and altogether quite appealing. The old setup, though, had slides, and stiff-springed animal rides, and swings--marvelous swings, with a fixed-width seat that you could actually stand on! Far better, I say, than those limp black stretches of rubber that they put on today's swings. Those ones hug your butt and make it impossible to keep the chains from coming deathly closer to each other.

My sister could always go a lot higher than I could. I never quite understood the whole swing concept. I knew I should tuck my legs in on the backswing and stick them out on the forward swing. I knew I should somehow add momentum by leaning in, but I never understood how that differed from kicking off the ground when I was closest to it. My sister and I would sometimes push each other, and tickle each other, too, when we got the chance. Sometimes we experimented with getting one of us to do a full revolution. We never managed to do it with somebody sitting on the seat. No matter. We had fun.

Beside the playground was a small road that connected the parking lot with the golf course. A tree hung over that road, its branches spreading into the little grassy area beside the swing. In springtime, the tree would rain a few dozen flower blossoms down into that little grassy area. The floodlights from the driving range and the parking lot would bounce just enough light to the playground to make these little arrangements of white and yellow visible amidst the playground's many shadowed structures. We didn't know what they were called, but my sister had apparently heard somebody call them "egg flowers;" they each had five pristinely white petals, gently painted a sunshine yellow in their center.

So we called them egg flowers, too.

We'd place them behind our ears. Being a curious little scamp (that's what the golf club's manager had caled me after he caught me sliding down the clubhouse bannister), I sometimes enjoyed peeling the petals off, until all I had was five disparate petals instead of one cohesive structure. We'd bring them back inside to Mom, and place them on the dinner table with pride. Most of the time, we just held them up to our noses and breathed deep; they weren't connected to the tree any longer, but they still smelled heavenly. And they'd be there for us every spring, welcoming us back to the playground after summer's toils and winter's sojourns.

The tree is still there today, I think. The playground looks vastly different, but it's still there. It still blossoms every spring, whether I am there or not. I hope it still blossoms when I return.

* * *

Pomengrates. Christmas pomengrates. Special edition. Japanese cherry blossom. Warm vanilla sugar. Mango mandarin. Rice flower. Pearberry. Pink grapefruit. The ever-reliable Freesia. Sheer freesia. White cherry blossom. Fresh vanilla. $3 a bottle, right next to the pink and yellow rubber duckies, disordinately stuffed into a big, transparent open-top container. And meant to look that way.

One by one, I unscrewed their translucent white tops, took a sniff, screwed the top back on, and put them back into their bin of chaos. There were a bunch of these bins spread out across different stations. The special editions were half off, not $3, as I learned from a helpful Sales Associate. The shop was so busy that I felt bad asking her to take time to go check for me. The orange perfumes near the checkout counter were...nice, but not quite a guy scent.

Not that a guy has much business shopping at Bath and Body Works, anyway.

* * *

Night-blooming jasmine. $3. Purple. Faint purple. $9.50 sticker price sloppily pasted on the bottom. The sticker itself has the outline of the bottle etched across it in dirty gray. "Beautiful and mysterious, jasmine blooms only during the full moon, filling the air with intoxicating fragrance.". Part of the Bath & Body Works "Pleasures" line. Infused "with real jasmine extract." Includes "naturally pampering ingredients" like cleansing papaya and conditioning aloe vera.

All marketers are storytellers. Hypnotists. Liars.

* * *

I unscrewed the top and took my druggie whiff of it. A pretty scent, certainly, and better than the others. It's familiar, though. Perhaps a friend uses it. She does. I find out a few days later that she owns a bottle of lotion with that scent. It's a recent acquisition, though, not the scent from those days when she'd come running out the door and down the dorm steps, dance shoes in hand, peeking through the window to smile at me before jumping in the car and starting our rides to the weekly dancing extravaganza 10 miles away.

* * *

No, that's not it, either. The picture on the bottle isn't right. The petals are spaced too far apart. I can actually see pistils and stamen. They're yellow, yes, but it just doesn't look right. The real ones have petals so close together that you could never just take one away without peeling the flower all the way down to the stem. And you would have nothing left if you took away the petals. They were the flower in its entirety. I remember what they smell like. I've forgotten most of the details of the playground itself. The swing is there with its red plastic seat. The chain links and the metal crossbar are there. I know the rest of the playground structure was made of wood. The stiff-springed animal riders are there, but I can't remember what animals were there. Or even if they were stiff-springed. Perhaps they were soft springed, in contrast to the stiff springed ones in the playground where we lived.

This can't be that heavenly scent...can it?

* * *

For now, this will do.