Ode to the Mimosa

Ode to the Mimosa

Rebecca Carroll © 2009

 

 

The non-native, wild mimosa tree is a hated, dreaded vexation in the south. Ask any farmer. Mention the tree to gardeners who care about landscaping, and they will shake their heads in disgust.

They have obviously never been a little girl who fancied the treasures of the mimosa.

When I was a young girl with long arms and legs perfect for climbing, we had two mimosas in our yard. How they got there, I don’t know–I should have asked Dad before he passed. It’s not difficult for them to spring up just about anywhere in the south. Their seed pods take root easily, but ours were growing rather symmetrically, which makes me believe Dad planted them. He probably pulled them up in the woods when they were a tiny, pre-pest seedling; once they are a few inches high and have planted their feet firmly, they can’t be pulled up so easily.

By the time I was eight or nine, the trees were the perfect size. These trees usually fork just a few feet up the trunk, and their spreading branches are perfect for climbing. In the summer, when the leaves–you couldn’t really call them leaves–but when the trees were full and green, I would take refuge among the limbs. The mimosa boughs offered a quiet spot from our brimming household. Before I discovered the euphoria of reading, I found other amusements in those trees.

For most of the summer, mimosas have fluffy, feathery pink blossoms that become silky powder puffs for the young girl who is not allowed to dabble in her older sisters’ makeup. When I grew tired of powdering my face, I would put them in my hair or pick handfuls to go in a tin pan for a mimosa pie. Sometimes I would stuff them in the pocket of my shorts to be forgotten and ruined in the washing machine. The leaves–how to describe those leaves! Not like an ordinary leaf, each stem had opposing rows of perhaps twenty tiny leaves. These leaves could be stripped from the stem with a swift, culinary-like movement of the thumb and finger, I launched them into a pan, and they became salad greens for a little girl’s tea party. In the fall, the brown seed pods added a variety to the salad.

When I began to read every book in our house, the trees became my favorite spot. I would wedge myself between the branches and sit for hours engrossed in that other, idle world where girls were princesses in waiting or lived in London or New York–anywhere but on my lonely, quiet road.

In my teen years, I gave up the tree climbing; my attention turned to the cute boy who lived across the road. In the years since, I’ve never seen a mimosa growing unloved on the side of the road that I didn’t revel in the memories of its delights. Imagine my dismay when I visited my parents many years later and the mimosas were no more.

“What did you do to the mimosa?” I asked, the answer obvious as I could see their trunks now level with the ground.

Dad had a sheepish, guilty smile. “They were a pest,” he said. By that stage of my life, I had realized the truth in it. They tended to pop up all over the yard and in the fields that Dad had spent years clearing.

At my own home, I relieved a friend of a mimosa sprout and planted it at the edge of the yard. Somehow, it never quite made it into the hearts of my own children; their attention was claimed by go-carts, dirt bikes, and the treehouse in the front yard. I moved from there many years ago, and I sometimes smile at the thought of the new owner cursing those mimosa seedlings.

At night, and when it rains, mimosa leaves fold up, wilted looking. What ancient nudging causes them to do so, I don’t know. Perhaps it is the trees’ way of resting, preparing for the next day when little girls would be prowling their many delights. At home, sitting on the kitchen counter holding our car keys is a nicely turned bowl that Dad made from the trunk of the mimosa. Sometimes, when I retrieve my car keys from the bowl before I head to work, I rub my fingers across the smooth, dense wood, and for a glistening moment, I’m in a mimosa tree making salads and reading books, my eyes brimming, my chest tightening with the sweet sadness of the long ago childhood.