Laure-Anne Bosselaar

When my late husband and I moved to California we knew what kind of home we were looking for—and, after a while, we did find the one. It was truly perfect. But the real estate agent wanted to show us one more house. We reluctantly agreed, and immediately saw that the house was too small. Built in 1947, the bungalow needed a lot of work. Small kitchen, only one bathroom. But, reigning like a huge, billowing jade cape over the whole house stood a 75 year old jacaranda.  Much taller than the house, it shaded it from the hot sun, and was zig-zaggedly busy with wrens, towhees, tanagers, house-finches, warblers, woodpeckers, bushtits, nuthatches and hummingbirds. 

Of course we bought the house: sagging floors, leaky old windows, rachitic furnace and all. We bought it for the jacaranda. 

My life now revolves around the best time of day when it shades the ideal place to go read under it. When dusk sighs too much of its melancholy over us, it’ll tell me when it is time for us to lean against each other for a while. I immediately recognize the sound—like a soft rain sprinkle—when thousands & thousands of lavender trumpet-shaped flowers fall on the deck at the end of July. It teaches me daily to be glad with time as it passes inside both our worlds, and to live through this together: both of us old and weathered, but embracing every single season, with its quiet resiliencies or unfathomably hopeful renewals.