A Brief Blooming

It’s peony season here at the Truelove homestead. We inherited a surprisingly extensive peony garden when we bought our house, and for one brief and beautiful moment every year it explodes into bloom. It doesn’t last long, a week or two or three depending on the species and varietal, and then the garden becomes just another horticultural burden to be mowed, and trimmed, and taken care of until early summer rolls around again. But while it’s here, it is something special.

I’d never number peonies among my favorite flowers, but certainly I can see their appeal. They are a serious sort of flower: big and flashy and declarative. I wouldn’t call them particularly subtle. The blooms are enormous, the colors bold and lush. Ours are pink and magenta, deep red and sunrise yellow and pure white edged in oxblood. They’re at once both gaudy and fragile, the hefty flowerheads burdening the stalks at times with their bulk, yet then threatening to fall to pieces in the first hard rain. Their smell is sweet, musky, almost cloying, and as evocative as a long-dead grandmother’s perfume. Peonies are beloved of old ladies and ants (and, one would assume, old lady aunts) and their blooming is always something to behold.

Yet it’s their brevity that I actually most admire. A single peony blossom, once it opens, only sticks around for a few days at best, before the soft and silken petals drop away in a torrent. At a time when the world seems to be bursting with flowers – azaleas, irises, even the multiflora rose – peonies are notable for just how brief their moment of glory really is. They are a blink-and-you-miss-them sort of flower. I can respect that. A great many wonderful things are diminished when they overstay their welcome, but peonies are not one of them. They make you wait and wait for the fat, globular flowerheads to acquiesce to openness, and then after a short but powerful showing, they exit stage left. It’s the sort of lesson that perhaps should be taken more to heart in our society. Not that I can’t understand the impulse to preserve that beauty for just a moment longer – my wife and my mother are both experimenting with wrapping the unopened buds and storing them in the refrigerator for blooming at a later date. But sometimes, in our search for longevity, we lose sight of what was special to begin with.

It’s a bitter lesson we see everywhere in our culture, a determination that if something is good for a moment, then we must stretch that moment to the breaking point. We demand berries and tomatoes in the depth of winter, we prefer our pleasures to be mediocre but ever present, we extend our own lives past the point of cognizance or capability or enjoyment…sometimes it’s better to know when to call it quits. Eat all the strawberries you can in June, then let them go for another year. Accept that gas stations shouldn’t serve sushi and the fiftieth Star Wars movie isn’t going to live up to watching Empire as a kid. Let age take you when the time comes instead of flailing away into infirmity. Enjoy the peonies when they bloom. Go take a sniff, pick a few for the table, wander among the colors for however short a time they brighten the world. And when those bright petals fall away, just let them go, and remember them fondly.