Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Hydrangea


Some flowers die more beautifully than others. Some are unattractive in life and beautiful in death, and vice versa. I should supply some examples -- but like Bartleby, I prefer not. Beauty is subjective, so too is its opposite. The opposite of opposite is beauty, and that can be celebrated as a mathematical equation, a statement of a relationship between variables.

The more propositions I supply, the less interested is the example-seeking reader. That is an example of a proposition: a statement of a relationship between variables. An example of a flower that is unattractive in life and beautiful in death belongs to the reader, and since I don't want to make anything of my own tastes, I'll speak instead of a flower that delights in life and most times never gets a chance at its skeleton because it is dead-headed before it should come to that: the hydrangea.

Pictured up top is a hydrangea taken around noon on December 19th. The sun is at its lowest at that time of year and its light shoots down the south-north easement between my house and the neighbours' like a laser beam, turning the dead blossom into an old silk lampshade. As for the shrub itself, it was given to me for my birthday some twenty years ago, and over the years I have shaped it to stand like a tree -- its leafy floral self its own large flower. This shrub is now over eight-feet high, and even in death it is something to behold. If you look close at its stem, you will see its returning form.


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