Three of us were riding in my first car, a tan VW Fox with fraying upholstery and a resistant stick. My younger brother sat in the passenger seat and my older sister was leaning forward from her spot in the center of the back seat. I was driving slowly up an overgrown, rutted forest road when my brother reached out and removed from the surrounding overgrowth a wildflower, perfectly plucked, then turned back with ceremony toward my sister, to whom he presented this suddenly gathered gift.
“You just killed it!” she said. “Why would you do that?”
Our mother had died not long before—too early by far—and our trip had something to do with that. So did the gift of the flower, as well as the response. But at this point I can no longer place the precise timing of the trip. I know there are other details I’ve lost as well (our location, maybe even the vehicle we were in). What I remember clearly is the rapid and jarring sequence: flower, gift, rebuke.
My brother was young, a teenager experimenting with a grand gesture and chivalric masculinity. My sister was young, in her early twenties, experimenting with doctrinal fervor and indignant instruction. I was young and in between, the middle kid; I drove on, middled, and watched the scene play out.
We were, all three of us, becoming and figuring out who we were. Thirty years later, we still are, though not with quite the same latitude or sense of possibility: Today we have families, jobs, plenty of people who expect us to be the way we’ve been. We’re long past our formative time.
My brother, it turns out, is still given to the occasional impulsive, performative gesture. My sister has remained intense but seems to grow calmer by the year. And our kids are now around the age that my sister, my brother, and I were when we shared that moment on the road. Watching my kids at this age, I think I know who they are, but I also know that I have no clear sense of what they’ll do, the specific shape their lives will take. They believe—and our culture believes—and I believe—that they’re still moving toward flowering, and almost there.
That flower my brother picked must have died quickly, either in my sister’s hands or, rejected, back on the side of the road. But the profusion of other flowers around it—like a couple of orchids my wife and I keep near an east-facing window—probably did otherwise. Long past their first explosion of color and subsequent retreat, those flowers must, like our orchids, keep coming back. They must grace the world over and over with their vibrant color, their riotous unnoticed life.
A flower, a person, a culture: There are moments when they seem to burst into themselves, to step into their full becoming. And then, unless plucked early or derailed unfairly along the way, there’s the long stretch that follows, the being that follows the burst. That ongoing being, less conspicuous and less flashy than the blooming, is the most of it—and is, for most of us, a continuing quiet becoming.
Adam Davis is executive director of Oregon Humanities.
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