Mimosa trees don’t often get star billing in literature, though they do appear if you look closely. There’s one leaning over the Finch house in To Kill a Mockingbird, part of the Southern landscape where childhood collides with adult injustice. I admire the book, but I don’t want to re-read it any time soon. The weight of children grappling with the darkest parts of the adult world sits heavily on my chest.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has mimosa trees too, scattered across its Southern setting. McCullers writes heaviness as well, but her protagonist is older and has quite a bit of agency, which makes it easier to read.
Percy Shelley wrote his poem, The Sensitive Plant, about a type of mimosa. It’s a long read and despite my complicated feelings towards Shelley for the way he treated his wife, it’s a poem to be mulled over. Preferably outdoors.
In the novel The Help, Celia Foote despises the mimosa tree in her yard and what it represents about her pending motherhood. It’s oppressive and disgusting, even its blossoms, to her. I cannot relate.
The mimosas in these books are technically background, but for me they’re never just scenery.
When I was growing up in New Jersey, there was a mimosa tree in our front yard, a slight one with feathery blossoms. It was my favorite place to read.
Research tells me the trees came to the North thanks to the ornamental garden trade of the 19th century, when people were enchanted by their exotic look and had already filled the South with them.
My parents migrated much the same way, starting in the South, making their way northward, planting roots in New Jersey, and then, years later, carrying me back South with them. Like the tree, we followed a path of beauty and belonging that didn’t always match where we were from, but somehow it made sense.
Since my parents were the first owners of our house, they must have planted The Mimosa not long after we moved in. I was a baby, not even a year old then, and I’d like to think they planted it to celebrate my birth.
I call it The Mimosa because I could hear the capitalization when they spoke of it.
My dad especially liked the tree. He was the one who noticed outdoor things, the way light played on water, how a breeze sounded through the leaves. He was the one who took us hiking, swimming, to the zoo.
I remember riding on his shoulders in the woods and among the pine trees, more than a little terrified but saying nothing. He’d bounce me with a “whee,” and the tree branches would slap softly against my face. I laughed because I knew he was trying to delight me, and even through my anxiety I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. (I was an anxious child; I’m an anxious adult, so that tracks.)
I felt nervous up high among the jostling branches, but not in the water when he took me there.
In Mary Elmer Lake, close to our house, I would ride on his back as he swam. He told me to hold on, and I did, absolutely trusting him and the water as he stroked through it. A sister sat on the bank, eating her red, white, and blue Firecracker popsicles, her shape getting smaller and smaller. And the further out we went, the safer I felt. It was like he was saying, without needing to say it, Look, you’re fine.
And I was.
I was in first grade, I think, a little girl in a blue flowered romper (my outfit of choice in the summer. I begged for the colorful outfits with the bubble shape) I still needed help tying at the shoulders when I climbed into The Mimosa’s slender arms with my first chapter book.
I don’t remember its title. What I do remember is noticing, even then, the difference in the language, the thinner, easier prose of my own book compared to the thicker, more satisfying stories my mother would read to me as I sat on her lap.
I don’t remember the last time she did that. Don’t you wish that there were an automatic time stamp that appeared the last time something happened, so we’d know, in the moment, to pay attention, to memorize it? A record book of some sort?
I’ll get right on that.
Some might see the mimosa as gaudy or obvious with those pink, peach-blushed blooms like tiny fireworks, the tree’s eager grace. In my novel Southern-Fried Woolf I called them showgirl’s dresses, I think.
Others might call the tree invasive, which, technically, fair. But I reject that characterization and the undesirability embedded in it. The blooms smell like peaches and nectarines had a baby. Their color, their texture, their scent together feel like an offering. The leaves look like ferns, decorative in their own right, small fans of green that frame the mimosa blossoms perfectly in a vase. In fact, the blossoms would suffer visually without them.
I’m not going to discuss the “peapods,” that imprison the dying blossoms when it’s time to grow seeds. I refuse to acknowledge that such beauty can eat itself. No wonder Celia felt conflicted about motherhood when staring at the self-protective tree with the leaves that fold in on themselves at night, as if they were wings protecting a child.
I have no idea how I managed to climb the smooth-barked tree without a boost as a child, but somehow I did. I was determined and had just taught myself to ride a bike, despite my mother’s protests. I was sickly and prone to asthma attacks, but I was gonna ride a bike anyway. For some silly reason I thought it made sense to ride it down a small embankment and I ended up flying through the handlebars more than once, losing my breath as I hit the ground. (I think maybe it didn’t have brakes and I thought I could slow it down better that way???)
I got up, brought the bike back up the hill, and did it again and again until my mother discovered what I was doing and made me stop. By then, I could ride the bike.
It didn’t occur to me then to be proud. It was just something I had done. (I’ll tell you another time about how I pierced my own ears at 12 and then pierced them a second time a couple of years later. Hmm…I guess I just told you.)
Mimosa trees don’t live terribly long. Twenty years, if they’re lucky. If we’re lucky.
Storms take them, or time does.
I know The Mimosa that held me is gone now. But that moment, the little girl, the book, the bloom brushing her cheek as she read, that stays. The leaves that folded in at night like the tree was tucking itself to sleep. The feeling that the tree was mine.
When we moved back to West Virginia (or, for me, to, since I had never lived there), as excited as I was for the new experience ahead, I remember saying goodbye quietly to the mimosa without realizing fully then what goodbyes meant.
And as I sit remembering all this, a male cardinal looks down at me from a thin branch. He watches, still and bright.
I don’t really believe in signs, not the way some do, but I believe we can choose to claim meaning when it offers itself. And maybe I have. Maybe, after the grief, as I walk through this new world without my mother, I’ve summoned my father too, with these memories. Maybe, in his way, he’s trying to say thank you for giving her back to him.
If I see a mimosa tree anytime soon, I’m definitely going to count it as a sign.
Word Raccoon isn’t here right now. She’s out shopping, no doubt filling a basket at our local thrift shop with vintage postcards and colorful Bakelite necklaces. But if she were, I think she’d be nodding quietly at all of this, whiskers twitching, heart full.
In my second novel, set in Nashville, a mother offers mimosa blossoms as a peace offering to her daughter, a sign she knows her daughter after all, since it’s her daughter’s favorite flower. Just as I often add tomatoes or geraniums into many of my stories to memorialize my father, mimosas serve the same function: Even when I’m not saying it aloud, I remember you and what you love.
Funny how what can be a magical tree to some is a sign of repression for others. Poor Celia.
Memories are the real sixth sense, wouldn’t you say? And literature is the container.
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