Winter has its own kind of beauty. There is the fog, thick as a quilt and gunmetal gray in the distance and thin like gauze up close where it shimmers all pale and silvery. There is the way the horizon at sunset, bare limbs silhouetted against sky the color of a stove eye under a boiling pot, looks as though it has been dye-cut. There is the deep stillness as the moon rises and the frantic rattling of wind chimes in a rainstorm.
But winter is cold and dark and there comes a time – right about now as it happens – when the fog and the bare limbs are not beautiful and the owl hoots floating out of the branch like wraiths feel like broad hands on my back ready to push as I stand on the edge of the abyss. And it doesn’t help when, on only the second day of the most wintry of months, a certain burrowing rodent sees his shadow.
When this happens, there are only two things that can repel the wraiths and pull me back to safety: baseball and camellias.
I don’t know when, exactly, I fell in love with baseball, but it may have been all those afternoons sitting on the bleachers at Jaycee Field watching my brother and his friends, without helmets or batting gloves or coolers full of Gatorade, swing and throw and slide with joyful abandon. It may have been when the Braves moved to Atlanta or when Henry Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth’s homerun record, but fall in love I did and every October, with the final pitch of the World Series, I start keeping track of the days until spring training. There is nothing that can warm my shivering heart like the words, “Pitchers and catchers reported today.”
While baseball stands as prima facie evidence that nothing, not even winter, lasts forever, camellias prove that nothing, not even winter, can overcome life that is determined to bloom. In yards where the occasional brown leaf still falls with a Camille-like sigh, the camellia thrusts itself through thick green leaves and opens like an old book, its petals arching back from canary yellow anthers. Milky white and the palest of pinks, coral and crimson and carnelian, Camellia Japonica is the Scarlett O’Hara of southern yards and parks and cemeteries. As God is her witness, she will not be deterred from confronting the cold and showing off not only her beauty, but her resilience.
I have always wanted a camellia in the yard at Sandhill and last year I finally got around to planting one, choosing a spot with just the right amount of light, far enough away from the closest structure that it could grow without impediment. I was so hopeful.
Alas, my attentions were drawn elsewhere last summer and the camellia died. All winter I have looked at the stiff, brittle limbs with sadness and regret.
Yesterday, just five days after pitchers and catchers reported, I stopped by my favorite park for a walk and was greeted with tree after tree laden with camellias – solid red and candy cane-striped, open-faced and ruffly at the center. The ground beneath each was carpeted with blossoms, thrones covered by mantles, thick and velvety. I could but stare.
I brought a handful of sprigs home with me. I put them in a cut glass bowl. I put the bowl in the center of the kitchen table where the fading sunlight could catch the facets and throw prisms onto the warm wood.
It is still cold. The days are still short. But now I remember that nothing, not even winter, lasts forever and nothing, not even winter can overcome a life that is determined to bloom.
Copyright 2025
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