Lean in and take a look

There’s a big autumnal birthday bouquet in my kitchen. I am fifty now. Fifty should be written numerically (50) according to the Associated Press style guide; letters one through ten are written as words, but anything after that is a number. Fifty seems deserving of letters. Fifty years. Fifty flowers, more or less, on the kitchen island.

There are sprigs of firebush with bright red curling leaves, late season pink cosmos, orangy-red coneflowers, crisp white and big burgundy dahlias. When I look closely at the petals of the burgundy dahlia I see leaves that look like tiny leaves of purple endive fanning in symmetrical circles from its centre. Then there’s the white dahlia, a tight pompom, but when I look harder I see uniform parchment cones tightly bound into a series of hollow circular rows. It says see my demure, bowing middle and my loud and proud outer petals. Come closer. The small magnifying mirror suction-cupped to my big bathroom mirror, another top fiftieth birthday present, also says come closer. Lean in. Kind words at fifty.

There’s an old book on garden flowers tucked between my cookbooks on the kitchen shelf. I spotted it at a church sale several years ago, hiding amidst dog-eared paperbacks in a cardboard box on the floor of the church basement. Garden Flowers As They Grow is printed in gold on a forest green hard back cover. The name M.M. Morley is inscribed in blue fountain pen on the inside cover, followed by the date Aug, 1914. World War I had just begun, and M.M. Morley was inscribing a book about flowers. Flowers helped when the world was uncertain. They still do.

I open my flower book to the chapter on dahlias. I once tried growing dahlias, back at our old house when the boys were little. I didn’t know you had to plant the tubers in a sunny spot then dig them up in the fall, after they bloomed, and store the tubers in a cold spot in the basement until it was planting time again. The process reminded me of the sourdough starter I was gifted and forgot to feed, or the kombucha mother I abandoned when my kombucha still became a breeding ground for fruit flies. Guilt had worked its way into obligation, distorting beauty into neglect. It’s best to wait until there’s time for these things. When you’re over fifty.

I’m not quite ready to plant dahlias, so in the meantime, I’ll paint them. I outline the firebush leaves with a black pen, then the rose, and then the dahlia. Dahlia’s are the hardest - a honeycomb that curls and spins. It requires calm focus. 

I put my AirPods in and catch up on newsletters. I just learned this trick, to open up a newsletter in the Substack app and listen to the words instead of reading them. Maggie MacKellar on how to be human. Cat Sarsfield makes orzo after a few glasses of wine at the pub. Sally Frawley makes confit fennel with chardonnay and honey from her caravan in Australia. Alicia Kennedy tells us what and where she buys her groceries in San Juan. And one from Anne Helen Petersen’s archive, when she interviews Sara Petersen on her book Momfluenced. I push things aside and make room for my laptop. I am writing now. Drawing. Painting. Learning. This is fifty!

The dahlias are coming together. Or maybe they’re just a blur of lines and colours and triangles. I don’t know, I don’t have my glasses on. But I like the colours on the page. Fifty is freeing.

It’s time to clean up and make dinner. I’ve read that dahlias, which are tubers just like potatoes, are lovely boiled in salty water then drained and mashed with butter. Imagine eating a precious Cactus Dahlia or a Pompom. After storing them all winter. Then planting, trimming, and digging them up again.

Fifty says, boil some potatoes and put the flowers back on the mantle.