Remember

Summer’s succulence overwhelms me. I catch a whiff of apples smoldering on the trees in our sunny backyard—utterly unpruned, given over to nature years ago, before we came—and I feel almost pain, it’s such a beautiful smell, almost bittersweet. Even more bittersweet is the scent of their fallen bodies rotting on the ground amid the grass.

The other day, I caught a gust of sun-filled air heavy with the scent of sun-saturated grass and our neglected vegetable garden, and I remembered, sharply, a dozen or ten dozen moments spent in my parents’ sunny garden as a child. Times dancing in bare feet among the garden squares plotted by my father, hiding under the climbing bean stalks in the soft dirt, picking wildflowers carefully cultivated by my mother. Pink coneflowers, yellow black-eyed Susans—so bright they were almost orange—and rose varieties along the continuum of redness.

Sometimes the memory of these moments is so powerful, it is as if I am there. I am small again, in my body as it was then, with my thoughts as they were then, seeing the whole scene all over again from that earlier perspective of childish wonder, of firm belief in interminable days and endless years. It is as if that moment—pick a moment—and this moment now are happening at the same time in different hemispheres or dimensions, and I am outside myself seeing both occur together. As if I’m both there as my younger self and here as my older self, seeing both situations from two different perspectives.

It’s disconcerting and painful. Yet I would rather immerse myself in the memories, and in the sense of remembering, than not remember at all. I would rather go through the cramping pain of cramming myself back into my old mind while at the same time wearing the new. I would also rather never, truly, to go back, immeasurably preferring my newer, older mind. Two minds, one self. Two different perspectives, trapped in the same memory, arguably in the same body.

In the tradition of my mother, faintly, we planted a rose bush in our herb garden two years ago. It’s not very well tended, but it still without fail, by the coaxing of God, sends out breathtaking flowers. On this bush right now are three withered husks, made bald of their petals by the wind or a brushing bee, or gravity. Nothing is left of these buds but the hips—the base of the flower—and even that is shriveling and should be deadheaded.

On the same bush are two new blowsy buds, brilliant pink and fresh. It’s a miracle and a paradox of life that we walk past every day: Death and new life, mortification and renewal, from the same plant.

“For you died,” says the Bible, of those who follow Jesus, “and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” Another place, it says, “[Y]ou have been raised with Christ.” Yet: “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Two natures—earthly and dead, and spiritual and alive, live and writhe and wrestle within the Christian, though the contest is decided and the spiritual will, without doubt, win. Our earthly natures were made dead when we accepted Jesus’ loving death for us. Like him, resurrected we live, and live in him, filled with his Spirit, ruled by his nature in us. Truly the Christian stands with one foot on earth and one in heaven already. This is a miracle and a paradox of everyday life for those who follow Jesus. We who know him each have a miracle inside: perfection of newborn life, decaying cadaver of the old. Plants, and memories. Two unlike from the same source, at the same time. This is a mystery, but a fact as well.