Magnolias for Days

On late afternoon and evening walks, I continuously become surprised by the plants and animals that catch my attention. It's as if every time I step out for walk, day after day after week after year after decades, a new flourishing has begun and the natural world, perhaps due to its lately acknowledged precariousness, becomes more fragrant, more vivid, more textured. Despite this, accessing this wilderness makes me feel the poignancy of life, especially as this place emerges, struggling, right between the cracks: the divisions and partitioning of a different landscape: that of mis-matched houses, fresh cement and older, broken cement, brightly painted shiny cars or else smashed, plastic toys, stray and blind cats and their counterparts, looking out, recently groomed and curious, the dogs sniveling and mean, stuck with uncaring owners, or else wonderfully mild, tamed, friendly.

I've begun to really notice the magnolia trees in our neighborhood. There are so many of them, and though I've seen them before, I never fully appreciated their beauty. They have a light yet distinct sweet scent. They carry graceful strength, clearly seen as their branches rise up, hardy and pliant, blossoming, uprooted and splayed out each spring. It's tempting to chide them for showing off, but this is no work of their own, they reply. 

Magnolias stand on front lawns and are found within backyards. They take root along sidewalks, branches hovering over the place where people walk and jog, hovering over the streets as cars rush by spouting gas and loud music, releasing pot and pointless conversation into the air, all mixing. 

Many of them are North American natives (others can be found in South America, the Himalayas, and East Asia). The magnolias we have here at the edge of Chicago are hybrids of two Asian magnolias (at least that's my hypothesis, drawing from information I've gathered from the World Book Encyclopedia online as well as the Encyclopedia Britannica online). The hybrid, called the saucer magnolia, has light - dark pink flowers. 

Much of this past April and so far all of May (save for one day) has been gloomy with a whitish grey pallor blanketing the high sky, the sun only coming out in glimpses. Magnolias somehow know it's time to emerge, so they do, as if deeply embedded in their genetic code, without caring if a new plague has come, not worrying about the hazardous elements threatening its existence. If anything, they're the best example of blind faith I've witnessed thus far. Still though, once released, some petals turn sour, fading into a deadened soft brownish burn, a slow decay noting changes, the added harms to a habitat geographically in place yet so much changed, the rapidity of cold to warm, the moody air. 

I wonder if they might retreat and never return. Where will they go off to? Will they wait it out? Reconstruct themselves from the inside out? Will they disappear and leave ashes for us to create a new language from? Will they linger in limbo, become a zombie plant of doom? I bet they'll return, same as always, unchanging in all iterations, scorched by the sun or fully perfect in their incomprehensible belief in the reasonable unknown, its sensory upbringing. 

To pay homage to these seemingly uninterested biological beings of form, color, shadow, texture, growth is to say that the fact of being here, present, in life - however long, however short - is nothing short of a miracle, incomprehensible and hellish as it may seem. To embrace that impossibility before it is vanquished. 

- F