A missed bus gave us an unexpected morning together, a field of dahlias, and one magnificent flower already occupied by a bee. After twenty-one years of marriage, perhaps love is partly this: thousands of ordinary acts, and knowing what to do with the time life unexpectedly gives back.
We bring flowers to one another knowing they will fade, and we plant gardens that may outlast us. Both gestures carry something of the same wish: that there should be beauty in someone’s days, that something we have tended might go on giving pleasure beyond the time we have with it.
A flower is not merely decoration. In Emily Dickinson’s hands, bloom is result: the visible outcome of timing, endurance, hidden conditions and everything that had to hold before becoming could appear. At Midsommar, her poem arrives for me with thread, inheritance, memory — and the women who left something behind by hand.
Some years arrive in bloom. Others ask you to grow underground. 2024 was a year of roots over flowers: love, endurance, belonging, and the invisible conditions that keep a life alive through winter.
