Moonvine Magic

    After dinner on warm summer evenings when I was a child in Georgia, the family would scatter to their various activities. My mother would be in the kitchen washing up, with one or two children to help dry the dishes. Dad would be in his workshop in the basement. I would be on the terrace, maybe, playing hopscotch with a sister. As we played, we would keep our eyes on the moonvine that grew up a post at a corner of the terrace, twining into the brass bell at the top of the wooden column. Someone would have noted earlier in the day that the moonvine had one or two fat buds just showing white through their green covers and would have alerted us all that a moonvine would open tonight. After hopping through the hopscotch court, I would look at the blossom before throwing the rock into the next square and hopping through the court again. If the blossom was beginning to shake, I would sound the alarm: “The moonvine is opening! Come now. The moonvine is opening!”

    Mom would appear, drying her hands on a dish towel. Dad would dash up the basement stairs. Children would gather from books or games or piano practice. We would all come immediately because we knew there wasn’t much time. As we stood there on the terrace, in the soft Georgia twilight, cool at last after the heat of the day, the blossom would shake like an insect about to emerge from a cocoon. Slowly it would begin to unfurl, spreading its white tip first, speeding up as it unwound its moonglow white petal, until it had opened into a rippled saucer of a flower turning its face towards the night sky, the white opposite of its cousin, the blue morning glory. We stood rapt at the miracle. It wasn’t a sacred moment – we might talk or gasp or caper – but the drama created its own hush. I never ceased to be awed, night after night, summer after summer. That I could in a few short minutes watch a flower blossom seemed miraculous. I knew that I could, if I were in the right place at the right time, witness the emergence of a butterfly, the birth of a kitten, the changing colors of a chameleon, but flowers bloomed so slowly that to see that miracle seemed impossible. Yet here was a flower opening, night after night, within the speed of human understanding.
    Two or three blossoms might come out each evening, never at exactly the same time but close enough, sometimes, that we had to divide our attention between the unfurling of the one and the shaking beginning of another, like watching a Barnum and Bailey circus. Afterward, we would go back to hopscotch or games, woodworking or books, separate people once again. But for those few moments the moonvine had entertained us as a family.
    When I moved to Oregon and built my house and started a garden, I wanted to recreate that experience in my family. But the local nurseries didn’t sell moonvine plants, and moonvine seeds don’t germinate easily. Two of my seeds did sprout, but the plants didn’t do well, succumbing to drought or deer or cold or heat or some other condition that moonvines don’t like in Oregon. Perhaps the moonvine, like fireflies and chameleons, is a miracle of my Georgia childhood that must remain both in Georgia and in my childhood. But, like fireflies and chameleons, the moonvine is a part of who I am today.