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The
Surprise of Abundance
BY
MICHELLE DE LA ROSA
Close
to the core of that which we call abundant seems to me to be an element of
surprise. Abundance seems to reveal itself in what is unexpected. I have
thought about this word a great deal lately, within a variety of contexts;
the unexpected link between them came to me in the form of surprise.
Take the garden, for
example.
The heady, prolific first
spring bloom of roses, roses, roses everywhere was breathtaking, shocking in
its abundance. Even the stifled rose bed of a neighbor suddenly shot forth
apricot magnificence. As for my roses: please. I stood and looked at them
for inordinate amounts of time, congratulating myself, and then picked
armful after armful. Even yet, however, I had not realized that those days
of abundance would be not revealed until the thrips and the lacewings did
their terrible deeds so quickly. I did not know I had witnessed true,
unexpected, unsolicited abundance until the roses were shorn to shreds. The
abundance had been so stunning, I had forgotten the amaryllis and lily bulbs
I had shoved in the ground beneath the dormant roses months ago. The
devastation of their vast bloom exposed yet another surprise: sturdy, fully
budded lilies and amaryllis I had long forgotten due to irritation with
their reluctance to bloom. I pull people over to the rosebed urging them to
“Look! Look!” Their boredom is quickly evident. There is a personal aspect
to the appreciation of abundance, I suppose. And like everything else, it
reveals itself within contextualization.
It was during this same
period of time that England’s Queen Mother died. It was not surprising, but
I was both shocked and surprised. How was it possible that this grand lady,
a major component of my childhood imagination and experience, a glorious
model of aging with beauty and humor, no longer appears on the balcony? For
me, and I imagine for countless others, the Queen Mother was as immutable as
the fact of British history.
Her absence continues to
surprise me. Where was she during the Jubilee celebrations? It seems that
newspapers have finally come to grips with the predictable attire of Queen
Elizabeth by iconizing it as a sign of stability, the endurance of the
monarchy. But how I missed that gorgeous little figure of style, wearing
the best-looking hat on the balcony, still a great beauty, the ultimate
royal pastel.
Her absence reveals the
great abundance of her life and presence.
The life of the Queen
Mother was the life of the 20th century. She embodied the transition
between the cultures of the late Victorian period, through the lavish
Edwardian era, and became, for me as a child, the only focal point I could
conjure, of the tragic years of war and its aftermath. I was a little girl:
I did not understand the maneuvers of Rommel and Montgomery; Roosevelt
belonged to my parents; Churchill was gruff. I knew the men from the
newsreels at the 25-cent triple feature on Saturdays, but my heart was truly
thrilled by the beautiful queen, seemingly always photographed by a lake
with swans and little princesses. Then I heard the stories: her refusal to
flee Buckingham Palace; her refusal to wear “sensible” clothes when she and
the King visited families whose homes were bombed to rubble. There she was
in the newsreel, stepping through debris in high heels, another fabulous
hat, ostrich feathers on her jacket. Criticized for her dress on these
occasions, her response was typical of her charm and humor, “Wouldn’t you
wear your best clothes if you came to my house?”
I can readily imagine
veterans of the war characterizing these recollections as trivial, but she
came to stand for the beautiful, resilient spirit of Britain under the
Blitz, and has been treasured ever since. It is not sophisticated any longer
to be entranced by monarchy, but I see now the utter paucity of heroines, of
beauty with substance in the late ’40s and ’50s. I didn’t know about Amelia
Earhart or Edna St. Vincent Millay; I did know the Queen Mother, and she
fired my admiration and imagination. A little girl needed someone.
The surprise is
that she is no longer on the balcony. Her absence, our loss, conjures all
the more the abundance she lived and was.
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