Melanie Hamon
Upon the arrival of spring, I cut a bouquet of tulips from my mother’s backyard and
situate them—carefully—in an emerald-green vase on the kitchen table. The garden thriving in
my mother’s backyard is her post-mid-life masterpiece: ten years ago this summer there was only
a wasteland of gravel rimmed with crooked-nailed wooden beams, but now it is a sprawling
ecosystem of its own. A restored wooden swing is guarded on all sides by squat, spiderwebbed
shrubs, and the deep violet of the clematis climbing on the white arbor welcomes visitors through
her curtain of curious vines. In the very beginning, my mother started with tulips. I remember her
telling me that when she planted her first bunch of tulips, newly wed and new homeowner, she
planted the bulbs upside down. I see them in my mind’s eye, erupting from the ground and
arcing backwards to reach the sun, stems folding over like fishhooks.
​
When I am ready to display the flowers, I can choose to place them in my mother’s place,
or my grandmother’s, or my own. I tend towards the former two, because all my reverence for
flowers dies out once they begin to age. Their perfume begins to resemble old dog food, and
their velvet petals grow into multi-textured campgrounds for multi-organism families. It makes
me want to disinfect things.
​
But I cannot help but study the image of an aging pink tulip one day, the moment in time
captured against a black background and glimmering in high-definition behind glass. The soft
pink of her petals reminds me of the bottle of Mary Kay lotion my mother uses every night,
labeled “anti-ageing cream.” Mary Kay, a cosmetics brand, is a multi-level marketing scheme—
meaning that each time my mother wants to order something new, she calls her friend Tammy,
and Tammy drives over in a pink SUV and sells the products she has with her directly to my
mom. When I was little, it felt like some kind of illicit transaction. Nobody would suspect the
two suburban moms chatting in my parents’ simple, stained driveway. In my mind’s eye they
shared a plate of homemade cookies, my mother’s hands carefully poised to conceal the box of
cosmetics she receives as Tammy takes ahold of saran-wrapped goodies. It was an illegal
coalescence to convey the long-guarded secret to beauty. Before bedtime my mother smooths it
over her cheeks with the tips of her fingers—a ritual prayer to ward away wrinkles, but one
which balks at her burgeoning crow’s feet and the laugh lines forming in slight ridges near her
mouth.
​
I have a bottle of this anti-aging cream, too. Not because I’m afraid of wrinkles, but
because it’s gentle on my sensitive skin, my once-accidentally-chemically-burned skin. When I
use the cream, its soft, sweetened scent pools under my nose and leads me around all day. It
smells like skin. It smells like a woman’s hands when she applies perfumed lotion, hoping to
mask the scent of the sweat on her palms but instead mixing it with another. I wonder if the anti[1]aging serum works, if perhaps I am aging backwards, fully unaware until I wake up one day and look in the mirror to see an actual baby. Or, more likely, it doesn’t work, but one day I’ll rely on
it just like my mother to resist the process of age, my birthright that was handed to me on my
first day in this world.
​
Towards the top of the tulip petal I see this future: the pink color has gone, leaving a field
of gray, but the texture remains. Tiny fibers of velvet peek out over the silhouette, and veins still
show from under the delicate weight of the petal. The tulip is an old woman, willing to accept
what has stripped her of her youth but not willing to give up on it. She still moisturizes her face
every night, the loose skin shifting under her fingers as she rubs them up and around in tiny
circles. Her smoothness is a source of pride for her, a medal that guarantees she will always be a
pleasure to get close to.
​
For it is the nature of beauty to fight age, is it not? Though, another story is there, too. It
is one I see illuminated in the sea of faces at the dinner table and just on the edges of the wilting
tulip. The war zone on the face of the petal is clustered, and at the corner of the petal—where it
is folded over—the landscape is clear. I cannot help but notice my view, restricted by the angle
of the photo, and wonder whether the tulip’s other half is fighting the same battle. At the dinner
table, the smoothness of my grandfather’s brow reflects under the light: a patch of skin with a
scar from one of his numerous melanomas over the years, remnants of a past life edged in
cornfields and roaring machinery. His wrinkles fold over the spot on his forehead, the grinning
lines on his cheeks, and under his eyes, remnants of a second life, a newer life marked by study
under the flickering desk lamp and notations in red pen. Yet my grandfather does not lotion his
face every night, and I have never seen him painstakingly smooth concealer over his shiny
forehead scar. Do the petals on the other side of the tulip fight age in the same way, or do they
allow themselves to be changed into something new? If the other side of the tulip had been
photographed instead, I imagine it would have looked gray in every area, a testament not to a
war against time but a transformation within it. I cannot imagine that this side would look just as
beautiful, although perhaps with less effort.
​
Her age spots, small knots of mold that cluster around her deepest crevices, look like
scabs. They bring to mind the small, frequent bruises and sores that pepper my grandmother’s
arms and legs. At 81, she is still young and stubborn, reliant upon an ever-changing cocktail of
medications in the morning that go down with a tranquil breakfast across the table from her
husband of over 60 years. As much as these drugs help her, they make her skin thin and brittle,
taking the gentlest bump from a countertop or the nonchalant scratch from her puppy’s nails as
an act of violence. In my eyes, age has made her vulnerable. When I visit, I pay the mandatory
tax of a hug and a kiss upon entry and exit. My grandmother’s signs of age float in the corner of
my eye and I wrap my arms around her shoulders gently, kissing her on the cheek softer than I
would kiss a baby, hoping to leave no evidence. Yet, I should know—despite my efforts, my
grandmother has outgrown any fear of what time could do to her body. She pulls me in with the
strength of a man working the steel mill and pulls my face toward her so that my kiss hangs in
the air with a somewhat surprised “mwah!” Against my lips, the skin on her cheek is softer than
the velvet of the tulip petal.
​
Perhaps I am kidding myself. The tulip does not fight age when asked to embrace a new
definition of living. Instead, she embraces change and prepares for the future. Against the dark
background her petals curl into a rounded shape, imitating the bulb she was not too long ago.
This is what her rosacea soldiers, spread over the mountains and canyons of her wrinkled face,
are fighting for. Though she resists the onset of age, this is what she is really protecting—some
precious cargo at the center. I think it could be a seed, maybe, another bulb meant to go in the
ground once the tulip has finally finished flowering. Or, perhaps, something valuable to the
outside world, a nutrient or sweet nectar meant to nourish life around her long after she is gone.
When the coneflowers in my mother’s garden die, gold finches fly in and pick the seeds from
their cold, hardened disks. It is something beautiful we would not be able to witness otherwise.
I don’t yet know how I will resist the process of aging. I am still constantly trying to
appear older than I am. When I think of it now, I see the ever-present blush of my cheeks
lightening to gray and the skin around my jaw, my lips, and my eyes turning taut and weathered.
It looks like a relief. Yet I know that more likely, the opposite will happen: my plump cheeks
will turn saggy, my eyelids pulled downward by the weight of my face and my earlobes
uncomfortably long. The older my mother grows, the more she looks like her mother; as I grow,
the more I will look like mine. Perhaps that is the seed the tulip is protecting, so that when she is
gone the tulips in her place will continually resemble her, awakening her spirit for one more
second when they look in the bathroom mirror. In that case, I believe aging will be a gift, not
something to hide but something familial, something to flaunt.
​
In the afternoons when the sun beats down the hardest, my mother and grandmother pull
me aside with a cup of coffee. They ask me to tell them about my day. They ask me to listen to
theirs as they contemplate lunch venues, or argue over who is cooking noodles for the
Thanksgiving meal. They ask me to slow down, and my eyes follow their finger as they point
towards the seeds of the coneflowers, filling the belly of the opportunist golden finch. They are,
in a way, the most beautiful element of the garden long after their most beautiful moments. Here,
the noise quiets, and the tulip withers, and the stem of the coneflower holds up the ecosystem as
the seeds are picked one by one. My mother leans toward me—perhaps a hand resting on mine—
as my grandmother watches us both, her back hunched and involuntarily curling over the
precious cargo that will bloom next season.