Flowering Quince
by
Lakin Khan

     The spunky quince blossoms have popped out already this spring, perky purple-pinknesses leaning out of disorderly bushes scattered about in various yards near here. Most of the year they don't look like much. Yet at the crack in the seasons, between just-barely winter and the earliest possibility of spring, they burst out, cannon-balling perfect deeply pink blossoms onto the spiky, springy boughs. Pluck two sprigs, say, or one long and arched branchlet, place in a simple glass vase on a spare table, and voila! instant Zen reflection spot: it calms the whole house, slows the racing heart, the speeding thoughts.
     Eighteen years ago, when I first noticed these blossoms cascading throughout a previously unnoticed, nondescript, almost ugly bush, calm is what I needed, for I was in the middle months of a first and unexpectedly wretched pregnancy, in which every day I fought nausea, exhaustion, and despair. Although already deeply attached to the minnow-sized kid who was causing such a ruckus, I knew I would be giving up the father as soon as I could manage to function.
      The middle three months in even the worst pregnancies can resemble the eye of the storm-somewhat calmer in the stomach department, a bit wiser in the head department. For me it was a becalmed breather between the first few months of hell and the last trimester of gut-splitting pre-expulsion when even breathing became difficult, and toxemia became an issue. Not that the middle months were exactly peachy-keen, but they were distinctly better. I was well past the first visit to my GP in which I begged her to run every test known to mankind because I knew I was dying of the swiftest possible cancer, a lymph node thing or maybe something pancreatic, something that made me barf at the sight of food, get the collywobbles at the sight of barf and left me exhausted just trying to remember my name. She wanted to run a test for pregnancy, and I looked at her from under my ragged brows and over my puffy saddle bagged eyes and squawked out: "That's ridiculous, I'm dying here, this is terminal, know it."
      That glimpse of those spunky blossoms came in my mid-pregnancy lull, when the waves of nausea-inducing hormones had receded and I could literally see again. I held my head up, I was no longer leaning over a toilet bowl, or a pan by the bed, nor was I collapsed in my bedroom with the blinds drawn and the door shut. I was able to look out the four-in-a-row windows, snugged up side-by-side across one wall of the back room, and notice the clear high-pressure zaniness, the ultimate blueness of the last of the winter skies, mark the grace and lightness of the winter sun that grazed across the bleak garden, all of which held a joy I hadn't perceived in months. I had survived so far; I might live.
      Passing by the front corner of our house those weeks, I took to clipping one or two sprigs off the vibrant bush that flourished there, which I thought must be some sort of flowering plum, perhaps of Japanese origin, for they resembled the graceful arches seen in Japanese woodblock prints. Slipped into small vases and settled on the cleared windowsill in my back room, they granted me grace; I wanted to keep them nearby, a talisman, a charm for the smooth sailing that is promised after rough waters.
      In that long ago house of my first pregnancy, the back room was a room of my own, the two solid seagreenwalls filled with life figure drawings and sketches from the art classes of my 20-something life reluctantly yielded to bucolic scenes of cows drinking in a stream in late afternoon and some puffy plastic Disney characters. Though once my refuge, as the only extra bedroom it now perforce became the baby's room. As the imminent birth neared, I restructured my breathing, recreated the room, reconsidered my existence, and remade myself. Even furniture, those solid objects we take for granted in their beingness became malleable and transmogrified. A borrowed crib, repainted white, was inserted into the sanctuary along with a diaper-changing surface rigged up on top of a low dresser. The extra bed, used mostly as a napping couch and thinking divan, stayed on, eventually becoming, over time, through several transitions and a few houses, the child's bed.
      Those richly pink blossoms, I heard recently from a neighbor, are known as flowering quince. I now recognize the bush in different yards around this new, and hopefully last, neighborhood: sometimes just a lonely scraggly thicket, once and a while arranged as an unruly bramblishhedge between neighboring driveways. The buds erupt overnight after the first deep rains of the new year, in late January, or early February, a vibrant punkish presence, not in the least namby-pamby, that shakes up, wakes up winterdead eyes. Every few days, in the midst of a walk, I find myself borrowing a twig, a neglected branch, bringing it back to place in bud vases. The just-blossoming mini-boughs recall that particular tension, that deceptively intense calm constrained in the grip of tough times, a trough of relative quiet surrounded by rough seas. It was as if the tough times on each end made the becalmed lacuna stronger, and myself more resilient. These blossomed branches extended a promise to me then, a barely perceived premise that beauty could still be obtained, even if deferred, that pleasure existed somewhere in the world even if only in a slim arching branch with three blossoms, then five, then nine. They embodied what I thought was a plumcolored hope: I would survive the pregnancy, survive the breakup, survive to fuller and funner life somewhere over a jagged rainbow, complete with whistled theme song, as yet invisible to me.
      These spare branches and vigorous blooms also resonate with a stunned quality from those strange months on hold, a staggering realization leaching forwards through time, that my life and my body would never be the same, there was no going back. Like an acid trip, you were on it until it was done with you. The tiller to my life had been yanked from my hands, and now I, stuck on the boat as it bounced its way downstream, was carried along; I was no longer the navigator, but a passenger of my craft. Indeed the quince blossoms were the harbinger of the swift tack to the left that my life took then, a tacking that continued for quite some time, veering and meandering far astray, adrift, astream, afloat after the divorce, acquiring a second child and another mate, encompassing other towns, inhabiting several houses, always with back rooms, though not for my use, and never with flowering quince in the yard. It felt that my life would never yaw back, the tiller permanently following an itinerary based on others' needs, directed down a diverted byway that began to resemble an eddying backwater.
     Time does pass, the stream rejoins the river. After eighteen years, I again have access to a back room. That oldest child, a snappy-eyed boy, is off to college and out from our cozy backwater into the stream of his next life, leaving the back room that had been his nest quasi-vacant, for he does tend to return, swimming up against the stream, or so it seems, for the weekend or summer, sniffing out his old stomping grounds, making sure they are still there. The second buoyant child has her own room up in front, and is ecstatic with its bright sun. But for the most part, I again own the backroom with windows. I can close a door against the flurry that is family life-I retreat, I brood, I restructure, I reacquaint myself with myself, I watch the quince twigs, plucked from neighbors, bloom.
      That turn, that deep return tack to the right, the zag of the previous zig, is here, it's now. The almost two decades of always responding to the unending requests of others ("Mom, where is my..."), of perpetual interruption, of the nonstop sequence of events that left me spinning and dizzy-fixing food, fixing clothes, fixing the bills, fixing the house, fixing the jobs so I can continue to fix the family-has brainwashed me. Now with the release of pressure, the cessation of demand, I am unnerved; I no longer field megahertz of incoming input, yet I find myself still twitching, drifting. I can't seem to get my bearings, I haven't found the tiller, much less grasped it; I only want to sleep, and yet I am bored with sleep. I don't know how to function in this new territory, for I don't seem to remember how to navigate, or plot a course out against the stars, or from my dreams. I no longer recognize my dreams or any self-generated urges; desires have been ignored out of me, starved down to desiccated scrubbed nubbins of their previous selves. My own self has collapsed again, or at least one of my selves. Once again, as if my life resonated in octaves, I must reconstruct another self, another room, another craft to take me down the next few curves, the jigs and jogs, zigs and zags of the river.
      Slowly, I am transforming the pine-paneled boy-berth into a room for my own pursuits, though the pursuit has changed from drawing on the page to writing on the page. Hesitantly and with caution, I add a few touches every day that more and more designate the quaint "Tahoe Room" as mine: the length of blue batik curtains I've always loved but no kid has ever wanted to live with, a few pictures, several bookshelves, a futon couch instead of that bedraggled bed dragged from house to house. I've rigged up my son's left-behind beat upboombox with the metal speaker grills torn and tattered, adjusting the magnetic counter weight on each CD because the cover itself is ripped off: Keith Jarrett, the Gypsy Kings, Buena Vista Social Club. Across the long sill I have placed the collected flowering quince sprigs, each in a different stage of blossom with their faint almost lemony sweetness wafting up from them.
      Perhaps it was the discovery of their name, perhaps not. Perhaps it is all a matter of timing, as they say, of sequences, of cycles. But the quince blossoms seem to reverberate stronger this year, eighteen years later; they seem to vibrate and echo with a closely held secret: that even in roil and turmoil, even when trapped in the whitewater rapids of change and adjustment, there are those moments of beauty and calm which we hold onto even for just few moments, so we can drink in the beauty of being, the rightness of a blossom, of a perfect bending of an arch, before we are dunked once again, and have to reassemble, rearrange, restructure, recreate ourselves, fighting against a current of time and a raft of expectations, the shock of the tiller wrenched from or returned to our hands. In this crack between the seasons of selfhood, I sense that a burgeoning time is upon me, a fattening up of my own soul and self, a switch in gears and priorities.
      I will go to the nursery this spring, and look for this bush that I only recognize in its pinkluscious bloom to plant right outside this window. I need to see it again daily, blooming or not, an emblem for all the jogs and detours still coming my way, a reminder of the zigs and zags that have been, a talisman of my re-acquaintainshipwith my newest self, and to the feel of steering the tiller again.

Lakin Khan lives in Petaluma, California, with several cats, a few kids, and the 15 friends they invariably invite over. Currently she seeks to blend fiction and memory into some sort of polyglot universal theory of existence, and ultimately, a reason to live. Some poetry, essays and letters to the editor have been published. Meanwhile, in the process of getting an MFA, she continues to work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

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