Encroaching ever closer upon our half-century mark, Suzie celebrates her birthday today, and I’ll honor her standing as a proper lady by not revealing her exact age. (I will state for the record that she is almost three months older than me, so I’ll always be the younger one. Obvs.) The birthday parties she had in our childhood were outdoor affairs, which usually found us on the shaded side yard of their statuesque Victorian home, involved in three-legged sack races or other such childish games.
At some point during those parties, I would find a way to sneak off to the gardens on the other side of the house, where I could follow a rickety set of stone steps that led into a secluded little section of the yard blocked off by trees and a white fence. I was more interested in the gardens than participating in any reindeer games, I don’t care if I could blow a gum bubble faster than anyone else after eating a saltine cracker.
At the edge of the driveway, and all along the stone steps leading down into the garden, vast swaths of these perennial cornflowers (Centaurea montana) bloomed. They were irresistible to bees, who buzzed and danced among their blooms, lending a bit of danger to the path into the garden. One had to cross the busy byways of these buzzing sentinels and risk their stings in order to access the garden. It was always worth it to me, and to this day the sight of a cornflower in bloom brings me instantly back to Suzie’s birthdays, the way peonies bring me back to that very same garden.
After all these years, Suzie still embodies the warmth and safety and comfort of that garden, the same place she shared her grape taffy beneath a grape arbor dangling with unripe fruit and flanked by beds or irises and hosta. Suzie and summer will always be happily entwined in my memory, and on this day I wish her a very Happy Birthday as she embarks upon another year’s journey around the sun.
