Camellias in Winter 6 comments

By Caroline Langston

Sometime in 1987, 1988, and 1989

Flowers bloom in the spring. Then there are the camellias of New Orleans, resplendent in the middle of winter.

You might not think that New Orleans even has a winter, but even without regular sleet or snow, the season falls upon the city nonetheless: The thick, wet, heavy cold air descends upon the body like Gideon’s fleece, and seeps through coats and sweaters. Hundred-year-old houses leak drafty air scented with the smell of natural gas from fire-starting space heaters. To even get to the city itself by driving on I-10, your car (or the Greyhound bus) must traverse the expanse of the giant Bonnet Carre spillway, which in bleak mid-January can look like a lake in the grayest underworld.

And then to come off I-10 onto the Carrollton Avenue off-ramp, and to descend into the heart of Uptown, to find street after street of white houses, their small yards bursting with white and red and deep pink camellia blooms in the season of Mardi Gras like a promise fulfilled.

I was a girl in this city once, a college student with long flyaway brown hair down my back, who wore too-thin Indian print cotton skirts and beat-up old pennyloafers and a long gray Loden coat that my older brother had bought in Spain in 1977.

I was a mess, frankly. I was a native Southerner who’d come to New Orleans by way of an elite, aggressive boarding school up North where I’d been a student on scholarship, and where, apparently, I had learned all the wrong lessons: Instead of assiduously plotting a strategy for career success in the future, I’d hung out instead with all the trust fund hippies, who could spend hours in our dorm rooms deciphering Grateful Dead lyrics or Rimbaud.

Back in Mississippi, like something I was trying to forget, I had a mother who most of the time would not come out of the house.

To add to that, I was a Christian. It wasn’t a secret but somehow it felt like one: there was no language I had then, to even talk about God, to say nothing about Jesus Christ as the Light of the World. I had a beat-up New American Standard Bible that lived on my desk amid a hive of home-recorded cassette “mix” tapes of REM and Neil Young.

On Sunday mornings when just about everyone else I knew was still asleep or hung over, I got dressed and caught a ride to an evangelical church in the suburbs, where I’d listen to an hour-long sermon on one of the Pauline epistles and wish that my family was normal.

As you might imagine, these two sides of my self put me into some peculiar situations: Very early in the morning one Mardi Gras week, I found myself in the back seat of Lincoln Continental that was driving down St. Charles Avenue in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, and had the sudden revelation that I was the only one in the car who hadn’t dropped acid.

I spent, it seems to me now, an inordinate amount of time in bars like Le Bon Temps and F+M, wasted on gin and tonics and trying to explain to also-drunk college boys why I wasn’t going to sleep with them. With friends I’d walk home from nightclubs at four o’clock in the morning, praying that we weren’t going to get mugged.

What did I want? What was I waiting for? I cried in the dark; I was filled with a loneliness I couldn’t describe, and God, while I believed in Him, sometimes felt as absent as my father, who’d died when I was eight. What I wanted was the yellow-lit kitchen windows, the softly-spread four-poster beds, the long dining room tables of the families whose children I babysat.

I was just a foolish girl myself, lost in the city.

Or was I lost? As a mother now, I think of all the harm that could have befallen me then—in cars being driven by drunkards, wresting myself away from strangers’ embraces—and it is hard for me not to believe that there was a force of goodness watching over me.

It was God, of course, who was behind me, protecting me. But I believe also now that the Mother of God prayed over me as well, her image in the dozens of Catholic churches that were mere blocks from the Uptown streets where I lived, taking up the slack for the mother that was still living, but lost.

Back then, I picked the open camellia blooms from strangers’ bushes and placed them around my room in clear glasses of tap water, then sauntered off in my unseasonable clothes to the Mardi Gras parades.

Now I would place the vase next to the icon of Mary that hovers, golden, on the wall next to my dining room table. For—and it amazes me even to say it—all that I had hoped for back then has come to me: the warm kitchen light, the smoothly-spread bed, two round-thighed babies in my arms like smiling Italian putti, and most of all, the good man who arrived and stayed.

Whatever else Mardi Gras may mean, it is the celebration of a people who are confident that they are redeemed, who can embody all forms of pagan ridiculousness for a day because the power of Satan has been sapped. Each year, the camellias bloom again, their petals thick and scarlet and open to the sun, but their gorgeous flowering is still a surprise, an unexpected joy.

It is I who am the mother now. Just days ago, right after Epiphany, I lay with my husband one lazy morning with our two children twined around us, the scarlet-flowered duvet blooming across our bodies, wondering what ecstatic possibilities lay ahead.