Rhododendrons
Yesterday my love and I celebrated seven years of marriage. As we go about the city at this time of year when every day there is some new bloom to gasp at, I give his hand a squeeze and say again how perfect a day was ours to be wed. Just in time for my bouquet came the lilies of the valley. For our house guests who had flown in from France and L.A. and Australia (our place was, for a week or so, the happiest of hostels) we filled the kitchen with lilacs from the park*. Had I been aware of them, I would have insisted on taking my guests to see the rhododendrons under the magnolia at Kew Gardens (in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood - not the ones in London, England!)
Rhododendrons are, like hellebores, one of those plants I can’t believe how long it took me to properly encounter and appreciate. It’s silly, but I think it’s their names that put me off them before I could get into them. Silly especially since, now that I know them, I get a kick out of voicing the alveolar plosives that I used to dread in rhododendron, and I chortle at the thought that the hellebore is anything but hella boring. So: now we’re having fun!
Last night, when we came back from a celebratory dinner out at the Old York Tavern, my love and I sat on the back patio and he played guitar and I wrote some words - a sort of love song, of course, but the kind you can only write after seven years of ups and downs (ten if we count from the very beginning and not just from our wedding) - and it ends with:
To me you’ve given your best years
And too much patience
And all your goddamned gears
And we are tired
But are we stronger than before?
I don’t know
But I do care
Some future absence
I can’t bear
And on the seventh day, God rested
He was done
So let’s have fun, now
Let’s have fun
And that is what we intend to do, now: have as much fun as we can. Let ourselves rest, too, in the knowledge that neither one of us is going anywhere.
Neuroscientists studying love and the brain have a theory that there are four stages of relationships by months, which I’m copying below (taken from this site). Contrary to the seven year itch concept wherein love grows stale and boring after an initial period of delight, the marriage becoming a sham or a horror-show, the idea of a deep attachment stage, calm and secure, that couples can look forward to is both comforting and inspiring.
Stages of Relationships by Months
Stage 1: The euphoric stage - 6 months to 24 months (2 years)
Stage 2: The early attachment stage - 12 months (1 year) to 60 months (5 years)
Stage 3: The crisis stage - 60 months (5 years) to 84 months (7 years)
Stage 4: The deep attachment stage - 84 months (7 years) and beyond
Quoting from Abrams’ article: “The deep attachment stage is the calm after the storm. By this point, a couple knows each other well, they've been through the inevitable ups and downs, they know that they can deal with crises, and they've likely made a plan for handling future crises.”
When asked if it was love at first sight for me and my husband, I can’t say that it was, and that’s partly because I wasn’t looking for love when I met him. In fact, I was a single mom and, having been disappointed by men, sort of determined to stay as far away from them as I could. But we all know that it isn’t the love at first sight that really matters - it’s the love that comes after. Which brings me back ‘round to rhododendrons.
I never liked them because their name was clunky and because I had never really looked at them while knowing what they were called. That is, until this very spring. I’m sure I had seen them before - in bloom - and loved them, but never had the name and the plant been fixed together properly in my mind’s eye. And now I do love rhododendrons - especially the ones in Kew Gardens, Toronto, skirted in ferns and cream-coloured daffodils, in the lee of a grand Magnolia. You’ll find them just southeast of the Beaches Library, that perfect, red-walled, plush-carpeted confection.
To close: a little Sylvia Plath.
Fable Of The Rhododendron Stealers
I walked the unwalked garden of rose-beds
In the public park; at home felt the want
Of a single rose present to imagine
The garden's remainder in full paint.
The stone lion-head set in the wall
Let drop its spittle of sluggish green
Into the stone basin. I snipped
An orange bud, pocketed it. When
It had opened its orange in my vase,
Retrogressed to blowze, I next chose red;
Argued my conscience clear which robbed
The park of less red than withering did.
Musk satisfied my nose, red my eye,
The petals' nap my fingertips:
I considered the poetry I rescued
From blind air, from complete eclipse.
Yet today, a yellow bud in my hand,
I stalled at sudden noisy crashes
From the laurel thicket. No one approached.
A spasm took the rhododendron bushes:
Three girls, engrossed, were wrenching full clusters
Of cerise and pink from the rhododendron,
Mountaining them on spread newspaper.
They brassily picked, slowed by no chagrin,
And wouldn't pause for my straight look.
But gave me pause, my rose a charge,
Whether nicety stood confounded by love,
Or petty thievery by large.
* Yes, I used to steal flowers sometimes - a bad habit I took a long time to shed. And I’ve been told, too, that some people don’t bring lilacs into the house for superstitious reasons (they are thought to attract faeries) and/or because their scent is “a lot.”
