Davis McCombs

Ephemeroptera

In early May of this year, I turned fifty-four. The weather on my birthday, as it so often is, was perfect: a dew-spattered morning with scraps of fog gave way to hours of sun and to the wandering, threadlike flight of mayflies over the pond and over the tall grass in our field. By afternoon, the faintest tendrils of the scent of honeysuckle were coiling up from the shadows of the fence and, just to the left of our garage, our ten-foot-tall (and aptly named) Snowball Bush was at the peak of its brief and riotous season of bloom.

That plant—a Virburnum Opulus, to be specific—was started from a plant that was given to me by my grandmother when I was a child. I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t growing in the yard of the house where I grew up, when its immense and showy blooms didn’t mark my birthday, just as she told me they would. Her own Snowball Bush was almost certainly a “start” from another plant, and considering how many members of her branch of the family lived well into their 90s and beyond, there’s no telling how far back in time the history stretches. I love thinking about this. And I find that more and more in this evanescent life, I crave those moments of connection to something older, vaster, deeper.

Caring for the plant—pruning, watering, touching its leaves and stems—is, I like to think, a link to my grandmother and to a world that now seems impossibly remote. This is a woman who, as a young girl, rode in a covered wagon from Arkansas to Kentucky, who made butter in a wooden churn, and who lived many decades of her life without electric lights and running water.

On my birthday, as I do each year, I snapped a photo of the Snowball Bush with my phone. And before I walked away, I stopped and held one of its silky flower clusters, for just a moment, in my hand.