Kin

I tell my parents that the earliest memory I have is of a mural on my nursery wall; a jungle of exotic palms and red orchids with smiling snakes and happy lions; I never trusted them, with their pearly fangs and glossy eyes.

My parents pat my arm and tell me I was too young to remember such things. Oh love, you’ve just confused memory with photographs.

But I know they’re wrong: because that’s not actually my earliest memory. There’s something else, something earlier, something before.

I remember the colour white.

I remember a feathery feeling on my face.

I remember a scent, sweet and heady, that I scoured perfume counters for all my life but didn’t find until I stumbled over potted gardenias at the local nursery.

I search for her everywhere; the traffic, the crowds at Sunday markets, bus stops, movie theatres. There’s a scrap book in my cupboard heavy with the weight of cut-out smiles, Sunday afternoons, birthdays, warm hands, weddings, Christmases. I used to search for her in magazines when I was a girl, agonising over the colour of her eyes, the light in her hair, the feeling of her arms. Now I just search for her in my mind, as though if I overturn enough pebbles, if I look under enough rocks, if I just reach into the deepest darkest corners of dust and grime, I will come away with the shiny brass key.

Today she is the woman with the bright turquoise scarf and big silver hoop earrings who’s walking the aisles of oriental lilies and keeps coming back to the bright white stars over the crimson. I watch her from two aisles away, obscured by the exotic palms and hibiscus. Her hair is caught in chopsticks and she wears feline-shaped black glasses. I’m sure her eyes are violet, like my own. She’ll leave here in her Volkswagen and drive home to her cottage with a cherry red letterbox. She’ll listen to Rachmaninov and have a bookshelf peppered with fem-lit, contemporaries and art journals. She’ll drink rosehip tea on her front porch with her white cat and as she blows the steam across her cup, her violet eyes sweeping over her garden of wild lilies, she’ll say my name.

Except it can’t be her; the woman with the scarf and earrings and cat eyes, which upon closer inspection, are brown not violet. It can’t be her because lilies do not bear the scent of white or feel like feathers in my heart.

I wilt amidst hundreds of potent creamy French gardenia, the sweet and heady scent planting untethered blooms in my mind. Tendrils of despair wind up my spine and my eyes search the orchids and palms. I absentmindedly spear a gardenia petal with my fingernail, envious of their roots.

There – that woman at the far end of the aisle with the rosebud smile and red gumboots.

I can’t see her eyes, but I bet they’re violet.

copyright © 2009, Holly Ringland.

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Tags:

gardenia, holly, jungle, kin, lilies, lions, mother, orchids, peoplewatching, ringland, roots, searching, snakes, tendril and vine