Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
I tuck the three small flowering primula into one wide, shallow pot, tamping soil around and between them with careful fingers. The yellow, white and purple flowers surrounded by heart-shaped green leaves make me smile. I haven’t bought primula in years, but today they called to me. The colour is welcome; my small patio has only white heather in bloom in early March, even though it’s south-facing and free of snow. Primula symbolizes transition for me, the shift from late winter to early spring.
It’s still too cold to linger on the patio so I place the pot on a tall stand near the sliding door so I’ll be able to see it from my favourite spot on the living room couch. The promise of spring.
The first time primula made an impression on me was a frigid, black January night nearly 40 years ago. It was 7 p.m.; I’d gone to the gym after work and then run out of gas on the way home. I called my boyfriend from a phone booth to see whether he’d rescue me, too cold and tired to care that I looked like a fool. We’d been going out about seven months and I’d given him a key to my place two days earlier.
“Have you been home yet?” he asked.
“No. Why?”
“I’ll meet you at the car in 15 minutes.”
He arrived with a five-gallon container of gas, suggested we go out to dinner since neither of us had eaten and followed me home. When we went inside, I saw them sitting on the kitchen table – three small pots of primula, yellow, white and purple flowers amid green leaves, little explosions of colour in the midwinter bleakness. A note lay beside them in his small cramped writing. It’s dark and frozen now, but spring will come. I love you. Paul.
It was the first time he’d used the key. The first time he’d said he loved me. The first time he’d stayed over on a weeknight. The only time he gave me flowers. Not a flower-giving kind of guy. Thirty-eight years later I can still feel the warmth that surged up in me that night.
Not a marrying kind of guy either, it turned out, not with one broken marriage behind him. It took eight years to persuade him to reconsider. We finally settled on a March date and then argued about the venue. I wanted a church wedding for the spiritual component; he wanted a secular city hall ceremony. In the end, we compromised; a Unitarian minister, a morning wedding in a small, 100-year-old pub. My father escorted me down a flight of stairs to where Paul waited by a little coal-burning fire. Twenty family members sat at the round green tables. Paul’s mother trembled with tears as she saw him marry formally for the first time. He’d eloped previously. This time he’d bought his first-ever bespoke suit and his smile glowed warmer than the crackling fire. Large baskets of tulips, forsythia branches, pussy willow and daffodils blazed on the stair landing and a side table that normally held cutlery. A pot of primula sat on each of the eight pub tables. It was a pearl-grey day but as we signed the papers, spring sunshine flooded in through the deep-set windows, gleaming on the pots of primula, the stone walls and the antique bar with its brass foot rail.
Six months later, no spring flowers were available but I asked for yellow, white and purple flowers for his funeral casket. All the wedding guests came to the service in the church I used to attend, plus an overflow crowd of friends and work colleagues. No one knew what to say to me. I felt chilled and numb, despite the crowd and the warm September day. I clamped down hard on my grief because whenever I cried I had to pee and I wasn’t sure where the washroom was.
Your funeral, my choice of venue, I said fiercely in my mind to Paul. If you didn’t want a church service you should have lived. You should have lived.
It took me a long time to commit to life again. Eventually, I fled the remnants of my old world, job, home, family and moved on. Now I live in an apartment on the West Coast.
Our wedding was 30 years ago. Some of the wedding guests have died since then. My sister-in-law is 81 now and my nieces have forgotten I was ever married. I don’t see my step-siblings. Perhaps once a year I meet up with my brother and sister. Mostly we connect by phone or e-mail. My sister has had two knee replacements and uses a cane; arthritis flares intermittently in my feet, knees and hands. These days when people see our wedding photo, a close-up of Paul and me, back to back and laughing at the photographer, they don’t recognize either of us.
But today, as the sun warms the early spring flowers, I remember the love and the serenity, notice that over the years my grief has dissolved into gratitude, and I feel young again, for a little while.
Leslie Hill lives in Vancouver.
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