Harbingers of Spring

On magnolias, openness, and a sense of hope

"It’s blooming," I said to my father as we pulled into the driveway of the family home. The grand magnolia tree, planted at the centre of the garden and branching across the entire front yard, was an entrancing canopy of white and pink flowers.

"Of course it is. It’s been blooming in mid-March since, well, forever?"

He seemed surprised by my surprise.

"I’ve been losing track of time. Seasons come and go, and it’s all a bit blurred, you know? Maybe it’s because I’m always rushing. Or maybe it’s because we don’t have magnolias in Venice, which is too bad, because they really are my favourite."

"You should come here more often. Look, the peach tree is in bloom, too."

"This reminds me of Mum’s favourite song. You know the one? Fiori rosa, fiori di pesco…"

"I know which one. We’ve been together for 45 years."

When I was in school, the blooming magnolia tree in front of the house marked the approaching end of yet another year of waking up in the dark, rushing for the bus, and feeling perennially anxious, tired, and hungry. Magnolias were harbingers of The Season of Hope, and for that, I came to love them.

When I first arrived in London in mid-March of 2012, magnolias were blooming everywhere and their familiar sight soothed my sense of displacement. I took many pictures of them on my days off from slicing cheese in Kensington––my first job as an immigrant in the UK––and shared them on my blog alongside words recounting the details of this new life abroad. I wrote about the magnolias, about the lush parks, about produce and new rituals, about the long hours of daylight that that latitude granted. I wrote about the new dishes I concocted, inspired by novel flavours and ingredients: things like stewed Yorkshire rhubarb, scones, or wild garlic pesto. What I didn’t write about: the physical exhaustion and constant financial fear of those early months. Sometimes I wonder whether I’d do it again: leave with just two suitcases, no money, no job, no place to live––with courage and imprudence. What I didn’t have then that I have now: patience; the ability to work in my home country; foresight. What I had then that I don’t have now: the urgency of love.

I also didn’t have an iPhone. I carried my camera wherever I went so I could capture the city as I absorbed it, covered its vastness, mapped it. I carried books, too. During those first London days, reading under the pink shade of a magnolia in Kensington Park after my morning shift, I wept as I turned the pages of a memoir in which a husband retraced the tragic loss of his wife to a fatal wave. After I finished the book, I remember being overwhelmed with a feeling of grief that was at odds with the nature of things, the beautiful magnolias, the blue sky. I tried to walk it off before catching the tube home to Wimbledon Park, but I remained pensive for days afterwards, processing grief by proxy, as if the choices I had made––to love and share a courageous life with someone––had exposed me to the chance of loss, and only then was I grasping its deep, dangerously painful proportions.

In a passage of the book, Aura, the protagonist, tells her husband: “We have everything we need to be happy. We don’t have to be rich. We can get jobs in universities if we need them. We have our books, our reading, our writing, and we have each other. Frank, we don’t need more to be happy. We are so lucky. Do you know how lucky we are?”

And I felt it, too.

A few days later, a piece of paper was taped on the wall of our bedroom. It listed, in regular handwriting, the priorities for our life together. At the top was simplicity (whatever that meant), followed by eating together. Then, in sequence: nature, conversation, creativity, sunlight, culture, travel, love. There wasn’t family, money, sex or career. There wasn’t owning a house or affirming ourselves as professionals. There was only a tender belief that if we had kept to regular lunches and dinners, supported each other in our small creative endeavours, and shared this accumulation of small, significant moments, then we would be fine.

We were fine.

What happened then?

Credevo che l’azzurro dei tuoi occhi per me,
fosse sempre cielo, non é
[I thought that the blue of your eyes for me
was always sky, it isn't]

I opened that memoir again a few days ago to retrace the story so I could write about it. A dry magnolia petal fell off its front page.

---

Early signs of spring in Venice, the city of marbles and stone where flowering trees are few and far between:

Being awakened by daylight on a weekday;

Reading on a bench, realising it’s too warm for a coat;

The scent of fabric softener hitting your nose as you walk underneath a line of fresh laundry hanging in the sun;

Daisies dotting the grass of Sant’Elena.

Also, the mimosa tree near Campo Santa Margherita, planted, I later discovered, by Gaetano, a doctor from Puglia who moved to Venice many moons ago and decided to stay.

"I planted that tree as soon as I got married and bought my home in Dorsoduro, not knowing if it’ll ever survive. Everybody advised me against it. ‘It’ll die from lack of sunlight,’ they used to tell me. But the tree is still there, and it’s as lush as ever. It marks the start of spring—a hopeful omen. Now, everybody stops and photographs it."

During those luminous spring days in 2021, when I had just arrived in the city and knew no one; before the purple haze of wisteria would steal the scene and the scent of jasmine would fill the air from a place near and yet unknown, that mimosa tree felt like a smile I wanted to smile back at. I walked past it on my way to the Zattere, joined the students as they sat on the ground with a drink that, following the limitations of the time, you could only take away, no matter whether that meant moving just a few metres away from the kiosk that served it. I took pictures of the closed umbrellas, the red reflections of the spritzes on the pavement, sunlight.

At that kiosk, on a sunny afternoon in early April, I met two of the people who would become pillars of this new life chapter. Through them, I met other people, and then some more, like a domino effect whose speed was propelled by the need to recognise each other, be open, create community in the wake of solitude, be seen. I met these people at a time in which I was learning to be alone, but more than that, I was unlearning to be a half and realising that part of the process of becoming whole was re-learning the value of friendship. How to cultivate it, welcome it, rely on it, prioritise it. How to lift the barriers, relax the shoulders, resist the urge to seek completeness through partnership and, instead, allow to care and be cared for in alternative ways. 2021 is the year I learnt to be a woman in her mid-thirties who has lots of friends, plus herself. Venice was the the enabler, the silent observer.

There were no magnolias, but still, there was hope.

---

For three days now, I've left all the windows open to let the air and the sun in. The efforts to keep the flat dry during the cold season have partially failed, so air circulation is now the prelude to an intervention on the perimeter walls to free them of mouldy spots and give them a fresh coat of paint. I start with white vinegar, its acidity an antidote to staleness, a carrier of rejuvenation. I wipe the walls and let the pungent smell evanesce alongside the mustiness. In a few minutes, everything feels a little bit fresher.

My father: “I’ll come and help you with the painting.”

Me: “I’ll see you on Easter Monday. Will there be pastiera?”

The ritual of pastiera is something I inherited from Mum, who inherited it from Dad’s sister Wanda, who acquired it during her time living in Naples. It’s a second-hand tradition we began and never stopped perpetuating in our Venetian kitchen, and that I continued to perpetuate in every kitchen I have ever inhabited whenever I couldn’t make it home for the original one. A fresh, flowery joyous thing. An essential mark of abundance and brightness, just like the green sprouts and shoots and tender leaves we see on the market stalls and in the grassy fields.

Like the magnolias, and the windows cracked open, and the energy that follows the catharsis, and that feeling of possibility.

Harbingers of Spring.

Ieri era oggi, oggi è già domani
[Yesterday was today, today is already tomorrow]