This Hydrangea nostalgia bush was grown from a 2017 cutting from its parent which was located in the front yard of my brick 2-flat on the northwest side of Chicago— one of a half-dozen planted by me in the late 90s, I had nurtured and obsessed over them for nearly 23 years — this one is now the lone survivor in my care at my rural home in Michigan.

But the genesis of my hydrangea devotion was not Martha Stewart’s ubiquitous “Living” magazine of 1990s — though she certainly named, informed, inspired and validated many a hydrangea obsession in those pages – instead, it was the nostalgic ubiquity of enormous white snowball blooms and arresting blue-purple poms on heritage shrubs that I admired, coveted, played and hid among during my childhood summers spent with my maternal grandparents in Murphysboro – a sleepy, rural town in Southern Illinois. /

I was entranced by those plants each summer — yet without the language to name and fully describe them to my mother when I returned back home to the Lathrop Homes housing projects – which was usually, just in the nick of time for back-to-school in August. Interestingly, I don’t recall ever drawing a picture of hydrangeas or taking a photo of them with my hard-won Kodak Instamatic pocket camera as a child – even though I frequently used both methods to capture/record my favorite things. //

“Nostalgia Kills”

Nostalgia makes us psychologically pine for a sweeter but largely false time in our lives — a blind, shallow or ignorant time that we prefer to, that we choose to, remember as “innocence” or romanticize or idealize as the “best times of my life” or the “good ol’ days”

— instead of thoroughly revisiting the entirety of the time, place, people or experience — nostalgia often robs — or kills the opportunity for true introspection and understanding. ///

Nostalgia sounds like the name of the a psychological condition premised on avoiding “dis-ease”

Nostalgia usually can be deconstructed to a skeleton of marrow-less bones — one that may have always been devoid of real sustenance or support —

look even closer, dig more deeply, and there may be evidence of ugliness or horror beneath. ////

The other day, as I listened to my friend wax nostalgic about her late, beautiful mother whom she still reveres — our conversation organically segued into ancestors, dreams, magic and divination. She told me how when she was just twelve years-old, a mysterious fortune teller, a paid-in-cash-by-mail “psychic” correspondent in the Deep South seeded an awful lie about her to her mother in a “reading” sent to her by return letter; that repugnant lie, her mother’s belief in that lie — and her mother’s subsequent response to that lie was unfathomable to me. To my outsider-observer’s eye, that event appeared to be the catalyst for her life’s trajectory.