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TITLE: A Camellia in December
By Jennifer Levy
12/02/04

They must have been the last two flowers growing in Vancouver. Fall was well underway and the damp chill of the Pacific air had taken its toll on their fragile splendour. But wrapped in the hand that held them out to me, offering up the last breath of summer’s vibrant life, they glowed with renewed vitality. In Norman’s gentle hand faded flowers, plucked from a neighbour’s garden, were renewed as fleeting jewels. It was his affectionate nature that infused and revived them, at least in my eyes.

As the city burst into bloom this past Spring, Norman regularly presented me with pretty well every type of flower our temperate climate is able to sustain. It seemed to me he hit every garden he passed on the way to the community lunch at the church; a stealthy, carrot-topped angel of botanical doom. Pluck! (This one’s pretty) Pluck! (Never saw one that colour before) Pluck! (Ooops! Didn’t mean to take the whole branch off with it…). Riotous bouquets, still damp with the work of Kitsilano’s lawn sprinklers, graced my desk for weeks, but they were just the icing on the cake. The real treat was Norman. Ever clad in shorts, his resolutely orange hair cropped short atop a round, freckled, smiling face, Norman could not allow you to pass by without hearing you laugh. He just wouldn’t have it. His brown eyes jigged with mischief as he mugged, extracting the maximum hilarity possible from every moment he shared with others.

The floral abundance of Vancouver waned in the dry summer months. Norman didn’t seem to be around as much, but when he was, he came prepared with one mitt full of whatever flowers could survive in the heat. There were fewer of them and they were a little tired, drooping wearily, even after they’d been put in water. Norman was looking a little wilted, himself. “Have you lost weight?” I asked. “Sixteen pounds”, he replied smiling happily, as though he’d meant to lose the weight, when I sensed he hadn’t. He said no more than that and I didn’t ask, but each time I saw him over the summer and into the early fall, there was a little less of him. He still wouldn’t let anyone walk away without a laugh, but there was a stillness about him, as though he’d retreated to a quiet place within. The dance of light in his brown eyes had slowed to a sedate amble. I could see the changes, but I couldn’t name their root.

I didn’t see him again after the day he offered me that last breath of summer. Norman passed away quietly in his own Downtown Eastside room, when winter had truly begun to set in. He hadn’t yet reached the age of fifty. In the chapel at First United, a small group of friends gathered and remembered him as a man who laughed easily and would have those he knew laugh with him. We told our stories about him. Mine was about that last breath of summer Norman had held out to me as his gift.

You can feel winter in the air now. People keep saying it’s going to snow. Most of us only see flowers in the windows of florist’s shops, or on television. Every day when I come to work at the church, though, I see the winter-blooming camellia planted by the front door. Against all the odds, this anomaly of nature bursts into bloom when all the other flowers have packed it in for the year. In December, its pink blossoms stubbornly burgeon against the wet, gunmetal skies of winter, defying the naked trees. Nature is a funny thing. Sometimes, it makes things grow where and when you least expect them to.

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