One Hundred Daffodils

From the moment I moved into this house, I began to sequester. Partially by choice, and partially because our family moved north a few miles and crossed an emotional boundary that most people who lived in my old neighborhood considered too far to easily drive for a visit. That was a big change for me because our last house had been one block behind a popular Starbucks, so every few days, one friend or another would call and say, “Hey, I’m at the Starbucks and thought I’d drop by. You want anything?” I loved the spontaneity and the frequent surprise company, never knowing who might call or stop in for a visit.

The neighborhood where I was born is a small town within a big city, both literally and as a lived experience. A small, established, close-knit community in the center of Dallas, Texas, the Park Cities is made up of two small towns: Highland Park and University Park. Each town has its own mayor and its own city council, and they share an independent school district. Just like many small towns, there are people whose families have lived in the Park Cities for three or four generations, and they have no interest whatsoever in that, or anything else, changing. I myself am third generation. My son is fourth. Neighbors know each other, have block parties, and bring food when someone dies. A simple trip to the grocery store for milk and eggs can take more than an hour, depending on how much time is spent chatting with friends while there.

But as soon as I moved north of Interstate 635, people suddenly acted like they needed to update their passports just to come see me. Even my good friends. Even though it took only seven minutes on the North Tollway to get to my new house from my old neighborhood, and even though it could take up to twenty minutes to get across the old neighborhood to my house because I lived on the far eastern edge. But somehow the trek north was daunting enough to be a deal breaker for most people, most of the time.

At first it really hurt my feelings. A lot. In fact, it really hurt my feelings a lot for a long time. But then, I began to realize that my choice of neighborhood was no accident. I told myself, and those who asked, that I chose this house in this neighborhood because the property on which the house sat was a blank slate and a thrilling near half acre. A lot that size would have cost well into seven or even eight figures in the Park Cities, if half-acre lots even existed there, which mostly they do not. But something else was at work when I chose this house. Something deeper and much more important than my excitement about having a large garden to create from scratch.

The truth was, my marriage had continued to deteriorate since that first explosive night, and when I started looking for this house, I could tell at an unspoken level that Daniel didn’t really want to buy another house together. So he just let me do the research and all the legwork. When I found this house, he agreed to it, though he never really seemed very interested. We had been married almost twenty-four years and had bought quite a few houses together. We always bought fixer-uppers because we both enjoyed the process of restoring old homes. But this time, he was very hands-off. So I took the reins, found the house, oversaw the purchase, and managed the remodeling myself, all the while knowing we had big problems.

I had wanted to build a small wall around the front to create a courtyard entry, but with all the other work the house needed, we decided that little detail was too expensive, so when it was time to do the landscaping, I achieved the desired courtyard effect by encircling the front entry with a new variety of landscape roses that no one knew much about at the time, called Knockout roses. The label said they would grow to be three to four feet tall and equally wide, which would make a perfect green enclosure for the front patio. Even better than a wall, I decided, because the enclosure would be roses. In the years to come, Knockout roses would make horticultural history and become the most glorious and ubiquitous of landscape roses, but that’s another story. In this story, within a year of moving into this house, my husband told me he wanted a divorce, and shortly thereafter, he moved out.

The roses around my house were growing fast. By the end of the second year, they were already over five feet tall, and I had begun to joke that I lived in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There were roses all the way around the courtyard and across the entire front of the house, turning the corner at the property’s edge, then continuing down the side of my lot to the street, and across the front at the curb. It was a lot of roses, but as I always say, “More, by definition, is more,” because where flowers are concerned, I don’t believe in too much of a good thing.

Almost twice as high and wide now as they were supposed to be at full maturity, the roses had grown together and it was impossible to see where one rosebush ended and the next began. It was a veritable Great Wall of Roses that had long since obscured the window boxes on the front of the house, and now they were even beginning to cover the windows. I told myself that I felt safer living alone in the house surrounded by my thorny guardians.

Whenever my husband would come over to collect his mail or get more clothes, he would comment that he was surprised I had let everything get so “overgrown.” I basically ignored him, chalking his comments up to yet another criticism that no longer mattered to me, and besides, I thought the roses were amazing. Yes, they had probably gotten too big for the location, and yes, I could have trimmed them, but they were massive rosebushes, and they were beautiful. Big, yes. Too big, maybe. But beautiful. And frankly, the more he would insinuate that I was doing it wrong by letting them get “overgrown,” the less likely I was to trim them. Passive-aggressive? Yep. On both our parts. But communication had always been our greatest failing.

At the same time, I felt an increasing need to further enclose my property, so I added a line of six-foot-tall, full-to-the-ground cherry laurels around the front perimeter. I wasn’t thinking too much about why I felt the need to do this, but when my neighbors across the street commented that they could never tell if I was home because of my “privacy landscaping,” I realized for the first time what I was doing. I was pulling in. I had planted a protective fortification around myself that was designed to keep everyone out because I wanted and needed to be alone. I wanted and needed time to figure out who I was, where my life had derailed, and what I was going to do next. The only way that felt safe was within the confines of this beautiful floral fortress. Like Sleeping Beauty, I had surrounded myself with a forest of thorns while my heart and psyche slept in a cocoon of process as I tried to make sense of my life.

Carl Jung defined our Shadow as those aspects within us we have subconsciously disowned. These aspects are personal qualities of which we are unaware, though the joke among my more conscious friends is that everyone else is acutely aware of our Shadow aspects, particularly our close friends and intimate partners. Ours, but not their own, of course, because this is the work we each must do. I believe it is our souls’ work to uncover our disowned aspects, both the glorious and the hideous. And then we must find a way to embrace and unify all aspects of ourselves, because this is the place where understanding, forgiveness, and true peace reside. Or so I hear. I personally have no direct experience of anything so profound, though I do aspire to it. This personal work is essential for us to grow, heal, and expand our consciousness, for the good of ourselves and each other. If we do not, we shall go on hurting others, hurting ourselves, allowing others to hurt us, and hurting the earth. I knew at an intuitive level that I had to enter into the darkness of this work. To do that, I needed to turn inward. So, in moments of grace, both great and small, my garden wrapped itself around me in a protective embrace as I embarked on this journey of self-discovery.

During this time, my son, Alexander, with whom I am very close, had been away at the University of Southern California, pursuing his dream of becoming a filmmaker. I was thrilled for him to have been accepted into the most prestigious film school in the world, but it was far away, and I missed him terribly. In an effort to try to stay connected to the life I knew, I had been back to visit friends in my old neighborhood many times, but in the first couple of years, only three of my closest friends had ever come to see me at my new house. For a while, after my husband moved out, I spent all my time just getting my head around coming home to an empty house and feeling into this new experience. My marriage was ending. My husband was gone, and my friends were drifting away as well.

Then one day, as the shifting reality of both my marriage and my friendships became clearer, I had an epiphany. I realized that nearly all of the people I spent time with were either the daughters of my mother’s friends, the wives of my husband’s friends, or the mothers of my son’s friends, some of whom I loved dearly. But how many of my friends had I actually chosen? And of those people I thought of as my friends, how many would I choose today?

Up until this point, everything felt as if it was happening to me—the separation in my marriage, the distance from my son, the lack of connection with my friends and their apparent indifference toward the preservation of our friendships. But what if, rather than continuing to make herculean efforts to preserve all these old connections, I decided to do a fruit basket turnover with all my relationships? What if I could actually choose, for once, the people with whom I wanted to spend my time? What would that even feel like? I had never done it before. Ever since my family moved to Europe when I was in first grade, causing me to change not only schools but countries every few years, I was always the new girl, never in one place long enough to forge lasting friendships, always feeling alone and isolated, always waiting to be chosen by someone who might notice me and reach out to this shy, foreign little girl and make her feel welcome and wanted. I never felt I had the time, the power, or even the right to choose my friends. I was always waiting to be chosen.

And here was that same shy, wounded little girl, sitting now on her sofa decades later, feeling yet again like the unchosen one. But what if I did something different this time? If I could actually choose my friends, what would they be like? Who would I choose to spend my time with if I could pick anyone out of the great well of potential people in the world?

I hardly knew where to begin.