Primrose: Sweet Memories Shared

A birthday party, a wedding, and a solar eclipse.

In my freshman year of college, I was nicknamed Liz Pixie. I had short blonde hair that I twisted into a band of curls from ear to ear, each snailed lock held in place by a sparkly hairpin. I wore a lot of thrift store t-shirts and painted my eyes in shimmery colors. In my Corolla, I kept a tiny silver bell shaped like an apple. A theatre kid in high school had gifted me this bell with instructions to ring it at dusk to call the fairies. The first time I tried it, the dark grass winked into life with fireflies.

That year I felt truly happy, comfortable in my skin. I was deeply infatuated with a 2nd year senior who gave me my nickname around the same time he kissed me in a band of hot sunshine as we loaded scenery into an old firehouse-turned-theatre. My arms were full of something. I didn’t have time to kiss him back. I was in shock and awe and felt terribly grown up when I was still very much a kid who knew nothing even though I felt like I knew a whole lot of something.

I still remember the way my body felt. How heat radiated off pavement, liquifying bones. We wore as little clothing as we could get away with, handkerchief tops and low slung jeans. We moved like cats, a jostled tangle of limbs moving in and out of class and cars. Even in the middle of the night, at the height of darkness, everything felt supple, like I could lay down in a bed of wildflowers and melt into the earth by moonlight.

The body remembers and it reminded me as I stepped out of DFW’s massive airport and into April sunshine, the smell of Texas spring casting me backward more than 20 years. Halfway through our trip, as we tore down I-30 trimmed in bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes, I asked my husband if he too was time traveling. I wondered aloud, Am I still who I am today or am I now who I was before? We laughed at my existential pondering but he said he knew exactly what I meant.

Two days before the solar eclipse I lay on the pavement by his parents’ pool to soak up sun. There’s a particular internal temperature I rarely reach living in the Northeast. It can only be achieved by sauna or Southern sun, and writing these words now from bed in the Berkshires I’ve already lost most of it. Like a cat. That’s how I felt. It conjures the image of many childhood felines rolling in the dust at the end of the sunny driveway, their bodies rippling like melted metal. It’s a feeling of looseness, gloriously falling apart beneath your sheath of skin. Poolside during this one week in Texas, I touched this feeling.

We had a birthday party for my father-in-law who turned 70, and the day after, beneath the shade of a tree at the far end of their yard, my husband’s aunts officially married, legalizing their love of more than 40 years. There were tears and laughter, fingers tightly clasped, hugs pressing bodies that were just beginning to sweat into sweet embraces. Warm, so warm. My heart followed the way of my body and I laughed until my cheeks hurt, especially over dinner and drinks later that night at our friends’ house in Dallas.

When the eclipse came the yard filled again with bodies freshly showered, dipped in icy spring pool water, coated in sunscreen in lawn chairs, or splayed on blankets in the grass where the dogs snuffled for dropped snacks. We wore glasses and craned our necks to the sun where the moon moved at 2,288 miles an hour. As it passed between earth and sun, a diffused shadow descended. Someone shouted, Go moon! We were in awe, together, bound by light and shadow, by heat, external and from within. Love burns brightest in community.

One night there was a thunderstorm. The rain mimicked a runaway train. We were all under blankets in the air conditioning watching a movie, and the flashes of light from screen and sky, the tumble of thunder that trembled house and earth, were all part of my trip through time. So many storms of my past showed up like ghosts. My husband and his aunt ran outside to watch from the porch, whooping with the massive gusts. I thought about joining them, but I was so comfortable, so warm and safe. My heart was full, even more so than my belly after days of stuffing it with TexMex. When they rejoined us and we all quieted down for the rest of the film, I thought, This is family.

Primroses in Prisma Color, elizabeth nelson

Across my in-laws’ yard there grows a patch of primroses. The flowers are spilling out of the bed and into the yard, and every morning more blooms opened to turn their pink and white faces toward the sunny sky. Primroses are one of Shakespeare’s favorites, and in English folklore they are nicknamed fairy cups. If you ate one, you might see a fairy. Leave one on your doorstep and the fairies might bless your house. The Irish believed primrose patches to mark entry into the fairy realm. The morning after the storm, I crouched in the patch and searched for a door.

I have always been attracted to magic, to that place where make-believe might trespass into reality, for what is more real than a belief that lives in the heart and mind? For better or ill we are creatures of thought, of dreams and wishes, often ruled by feelings, and it makes perfect illogical sense to me to fall victim to the charms of beauty, hope, and imagination. How often do we whisper from the corners of our minds what if, what if, if only? I wished I still had that little apple bell. I would have rung it over the primroses and waited for fairies to twinkle hello.

Victorian floriography thought primroses fickle and inconsistent, perhaps because of their short-lived blooms or because they open at different times of the day. Still the flowers were often exchanged between lovers, symbolizing sweet memories shared. Love can be fickle, but more often it’s life that is inconsistent and the heart is what must remain steadfast. Sometimes the day is peaceful, warm and full of sun. Sometimes a storm threatens to rip you out by your roots.

I keep remembering our aunts beneath that tree, repeating vows in the Texas sunshine, exchanging a kiss in a hot band of light. They’ve lived decades together - as many as I have been alive - and still, they chose to share their love with all of us as witnesses. I wish I’d thought of it then to give them each a cluster of primroses, something beautiful and full of magic, a symbol of sweet memories past and to come. Not that they needed it. They were stunning all on their own.