Friday, April 20, 2012

My Mom's Azalea


Yesterday, I returned from spending a wonderful four-day visit with my daughter at the University of Miami.  It was a blessing for both of us.  After months away from home with no physical contact between us, she needed her mom.  And I needed to be needed.  We did a lot of nothing special except spending time together, which is really the most special thing of all, and the visit filled us both up and helped get her ready for the final push to the end of this spring semester, the final one of her first year away.

It brought me back a long way, to the spring of my sophomore year, my first at Cornell University, where I landed as a transfer student in the middle of a long, cold, snowy winter … the very first I was to spend on my own away from home.  Ithaca was always beautiful, but it could be brutal, and the thaw came late that year.  Back on Long Island, the gardens were in bloom, especially the one in the front of my house that my mom had planned and planted herself with a beautiful assortment of evergreens and dwarf shrubs.

Perhaps the most striking plant in the garden was a tremendous lilac azalea, its large soft purple flowers opening like trumpets to announce the annual changing of the seasonal guard from winter to spring.

That spring, a Polaroid of the azalea came enclosed in a letter to me at school (which knowing my mother, almost surely contained an original poem, as well).  It soothed my soul in the same way I hope my visit touched Jordan’s … it was a needed glimpse of home toward the end of a long journey.  The regal plant reminded me of where my own roots were, in that garden back home on Long Island.

Many years later, the bush got so large it needed thinning.  Mom dug up a part and asked if I’d like to add it to my own home garden.  Yes, I would.  And I did.  I will always remember the happiness and comfort it brought me seeing that plant, even in a photograph, and I would love to have it grace my own landscape.

I transplanted it two summers ago, just about six months before my mother passed away.  It’s taken firm root here now, growing, blossoming and linking me even more firmly to my past through its presence.

Which made it all the more fitting that it is what greeted me when I pulled into my driveway after returning from my visit with Jordan … my own Azalea x ‘Robles’ 'Autumn Lilac'.  In glorious bloom.  The plant and its beauty live on, continuing to tie our family together and link one generation to the next.

Roots.  They’re extraordinary things.



Thursday, April 19, 2012

I Want To Smell Like Ralph

I want to smell like Ralph.

Not the guy, the perfume.  I know I have an old bottle of it somewhere in my bathroom vanity at home, and while it’s not my signature fragrance (that would be Estee Lauder Pleasures), I like it.  It’s fresh.  It’s clean.  It’s youthful.  And it’s beautiful.

How do I know this?  Not from the Ralph Lauren marketing department.  Not even from my own experience while trying it on for size several years ago.  No, I know this from my recent run along the Ibis Trail, a four-mile loop around the University of Miami campus I navigated yesterday while visiting my daughter Jordan, a student at the school.

It was a gorgeous morning, with clear blue skies and a slight breeze.  The campus is really pretty, and running the trail is a great way to see a lot of it and better learn your way around, which I am trying to do, since this is just freshman year for her .

I’m also trying to stay healthy, tone myself up and keep my weight down, although to be perfectly honest, it needs to be about fifteen pounds further down than it is right now.  Trips to UM don’t help, with all the inevitable eating out, but I wouldn’t trade a visit for anything, so I am being diligent about keeping up with my exercise.

And that’s what brought me to campus yesterday morning, running (barely) among the slender, fit, healthy, beautiful young men and women who are students there.  Many of whom were wearing Ralph.  (I know this not because anyone committed the Great Perfume Faux Pas of over-application, but because I was inhaling rather deeply from my own over-exertion.)  How many girls were wearing it was actually quite surprising.  As was my realization that they smelled the way I was running to look.  Hah!  The fragrance itself became a kind of fuel … the scent motivating me, urging me on.  I’d pass another pretty girl and smell it again.  I’d run some more, a little faster.

The sun was warm, the sweat dampened my shirt, and I’m sure I smelled nothing like they did, but I was inspired.  I added an extra half-mile, finished wearily but triumphantly, and went back to my hotel to shower, change and get ready for the rest of the day.  I put on my makeup, blew out my hair and added my customary spray of Pleasures before leaving the room to meet my daughter for lunch. 

"Mmmm, Mommy, you smell good!"

Yes, I smell like Pleasures. 

My kids know it, my husband loves it, and I have come to embrace it.    

But I want to smell like Ralph.