Limelight

What my mother—and a strange flower—taught me about ten seconds' worth of time.

The author’s mother and daughter.

The light in the Northeast in late September overcomes you like a shudder. To me, light has always felt personal—in the spring it rescues, in the winter, it abandons, in the summer it is faithful and companionable. In late September it alerts us to the turning of the Earth; there is a sharpness, a quickening of the senses. Early autumn light is the cheer of summer and the gloomy thrill of fall combined—that moment of suspension before the Ferris wheel begins to turn and if you’re at the top, you jolt suddenly before starting your descent. Blink and you miss it, move too suddenly and you disrupt its particles. 

I was suspended in just that moment one Sunday a few autumns ago, on a day spent with my mother and my daughter. My mother was 79 then, in the throes of dementia, and my daughter was 6, nearly 7. We were at the Columbus Avenue farmer’s market. The fragrance of soil sprang up from the dirt-lined path that runs through the gardens of the Museum of Natural History in such a pleasing way it broke my heart. 

I was holding my mother’s hand because her eyes are weak. Actually, the doctor tells us, her eyes are fine, it’s the connection between her brain and her eyes that’s the problem. She kept telling me not to hold her hand, because she could do it herself, she would prefer it, please, if I would just let go. But for me it was a matter of convenience; I did not want to risk losing my mother; the crowds were thick, mingling around the muffin stands and pickle barrels, the goat cheese man, and the many tables piled with zucchini and tomatoes, ostrich eggs and duck liver. 

My mother was 79 then, in the throes of dementia, and my daughter was 6, nearly 7. We were at the Columbus Avenue farmer’s market. The fragrance of soil sprang up from the dirt-lined path that runs through the gardens of the Museum of Natural History in such a pleasing way it broke my heart. 

There was a bucket to my left, as my daughter and mother and I slowly made our way up Columbus Avenue, and it held the most startling flowers. There was a handwritten sign beside them. “Limelight Hydrangeas,” it read. They made all other flowers seem excessively corporeal, such was their weightless softness. The petals of each bunch were a pale lime color, except some were cream and pink and burgundy at their tips. The result was a paradox, a riot of gentle color that lent the flowers more texture and dimension than single-hued flowers possess. Limelight hydrangeas resemble Baby’s Tears moss, sunlight creating in their petals the same velvety sheen. If fairies spun flowers from gossamer, they would be of this wondrous, peculiar, unnerving variety. 

I bought two bunches and waited for them to be tied. I did this while holding onto my mother and also while calling out to my little girl. “Lydia? Are you there?” Lydia is quicksilver, all movement and variegated color that shifts with the moment. “Right here, Mommy!” she called back, alighting on the ground after an ascent of a nearby wall. 

We proceeded up the sidewalk. The wind was soft and cool, subtle but sure, and such was the  general cheer of the afternoon that I did not know what to do with myself. I wondered if I stood still, holding the flowers and my mother’s hand, could I avoid disrupting the arrangement of molecules at that moment? If I clenched my muscles as I walked, could I pass through without shredding the mirage? This feeling—a mixture of aching and dreaming—how long could I sustain it? Was it mine to sustain at all, or was it some mystical atmospheric condition that had coalesced by chance, like a weather front, on that block, at that moment? 

I was holding my mother’s hand because her eyes are weak. Actually, the doctor tells us, her eyes are fine, it’s the connection between her brain and her eyes that’s the problem. She kept telling me not to hold her hand, because she could do it herself, she would prefer it, please, if I would just let go.

Everywhere the stalls synthesized their goods to offer up color and high spirits: sugar pumpkins, gourds, maple syrup, lavender. The other elements of the market which were not autumnal did not disrupt—instead, they enhanced. A woman had made marinara sauce from all the species of tomatoes sold at the market; she had lined them up in vats and was offering slices of bread to everyone who passed, so that they could taste each sauce and vote for their favorite. Here was the tinge of summer that highlighted the moment before the sun descended to her deeper autumnal throne. 

All of this overpowered me—in ten seconds. In all of ten seconds, I had lived an ecstasy of feeling and gone on to a wordless groping for more. Ten seconds strikes me these days as a profound unit of time, because it is this length of time that my mother’s memory lasts. 

If you have a conversation with my mother, you have just about ten seconds to impart the narrative thrust. Then the clock is reset, the board is wiped clean, and you must begin again. 

Ten seconds is not a very long time. Ten seconds does not seem like a “real” amount of time. What can be achieved in ten seconds? Ten seconds is the foam on the beer, the last bit of crust on the pizza, the dregs in your coffee cup. It is a trifle, a thing that we throw away all day and all the time. It is the time I stand on the bath mat drying off after a shower, the time I spend signing my child’s homework before it goes back with her to school, the time it takes to order an iced tea at the local cafe before I pick her up at the end of the day. Nothing big can happen in ten seconds; ten seconds is a bridge of time between events, the space between lily pads that we jump—that we pass over—to get to the next one. 

Ten seconds strikes me these days as a profound unit of time, because it is this length of time that my mother’s memory lasts…If you have a conversation with my mother, you have just about ten seconds to impart the narrative thrust. Then the clock is reset, the board is wiped clean, and you must begin again. 

Limelight Hydrangeas begin as lime green, with a dash of mint, and as the petals age they turn to pink and red and burgundy. The evolution begins at the tips, and slowly edges into the whole petal. When you look from a few feet, you perceive the variegation as texture; you have to get up close and really examine the petals to see the individual colors, the passage of time that each individual petal represents. I know this now because I stared at the Limelights for two days afterward.

When I brought the Limelights home, I put them on the mantel. I tried to catch them changing, tried to see if I could detect any overnight difference, even, but I could not. I grew a little afraid of them, as if they might be toying with me: they seemed so ephemeral in that moment in the market that they struck me as existing on borrowed--even stolen—time. They derived their potency from their insubstantiality, from evoking the perception that they might dissolve into a satin dust and sail away on the wind of early fall, vanishing into the waning light of summer’s end. 

But they were there two days later, in defiance of their ghostly beauty, which had only increased in that time. And I was asking them the same questions as I had two days prior. How did they manage to synergize frailty and durability? By what alchemy had they created their defining paradox? What was I missing? And then I realized. They had more imagination than I. They had harnessed some quirk of quantum physics or applied some philosophy of magical thinking to construct their crowning achievement. 

The Limelight hydrangeas derived their potency from their insubstantiality, from evoking the perception that they might dissolve into a satin dust and sail away on the wind of early fall, vanishing into the waning light of summer’s end. 

I had never considered ten seconds a useful unit of time. I did not think ten seconds could contain coherence, much less meaning. Many important things often happen in a moment’s time—people spot an old friend across a room, a person inserts a ballot into a voting box, our father flips the switch and the Christmas tree lights up. But I am not talking about a moment. I am talking about ten seconds, which seems shorter somehow, than a moment. Ten seconds was how long the mirage lasted on Sunday. It is how long my mother can sustain a conversation. My mother and I create a universe in ten seconds, impart love and news and music and jokes in ten seconds, before the clock resets and the board is wiped clean. 

That Sunday I became aware not only of how short ten seconds is—how many elements had to come together quickly to transport me to the feeling of heartstopping revelation in those ten seconds that day—but how long ten seconds is, too. 

Appearances can deceive; sometimes we cannot trust our senses. It felt fleeting that day, as such a short amount of time usually does, and yet I am forever altered by those particular ten seconds. We take in only enough air for a few instants; the lungs can hold no more; the body therefore thinks that’s a useful unit of time, a span in which crucial things are achieved. We do not store air for later, and the air we breathed a minute ago is useless now, but it was vital only a minute earlier. 

In each small unit of time we build a universe, act out a drama, twirl our child. Someone interrupts, comes up to us, begins to chat, and that universe dissolves at the very moment a new one is built. We don’t notice these universes dissolving and springing up, weightless but forming a very real chain that represents our lives. 

In each small unit of time we build a universe, act out a drama, twirl our child. Someone interrupts, comes up to us, begins to chat, and that universe dissolves at the very moment a new one is built.

Except sometimes we do, we do notice one, like catching a child’s bubble on the wind before it pops. I noticed one universe on Sunday, as I walked in the light of early fall, with my mother and my child. I noticed it precisely because it was gossamer thin and I feared losing it. Because of it, those ten seconds formed an eternal memory. Ten seconds will now last forever. Ten seconds is a long time, and a long space too. 

We can travel quite far in ten seconds, we can live the length of an entire play. I greet my mother and hug her, then offer her tea. Ten seconds. We listen to a lyric from a song. Ten seconds. We buy flowers and they provide rapture and heartache. Ten seconds. Of these spans, we make not one universe, but many. We do not need the last universe to inform the next one. True, when we can mentally connect the multitudes of universes we form each day, that chain offers the security of continuity. But if we lack the mental ability to connect the bubbles, my mother proves that we can still live fully in each one before it pops. 

My flowers did not waver, but because of them, I did. I, who was once unaware of the significance of ten seconds, was altered by the Limelights, in a period of ten—only ten—seconds.