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Friday, August 29, 2025

Moonflowers

The moonflowers began opening in earnest the day Don died. The night of the day. But, in South African time, the morning after the night of the day he died. Sensitive listening devices, training skywards, scenting the terrace, calling a moth or a bat or nocturnal hummingbird. Would he say, No such thing? (Is there?)

I told Don's bereft Rosie today, I keep seeing Don in everything, even where I usually might not. Would he approve of the moonflowers? He liked flowers. And not just the indigenous and the imperiled, but the old fashioned and the scented and the garden-grown. He bought a vast bunch of flowers and herbs to supper in Kalk Bay the last time we saw each other. Part of the conversation was about the dignity and indignity of death. How it was important to him and Rosie to live somewhere where you could choose the time and manner of your death, should you wish to, and be able to. 

And then he fell off a cliff while hunting for an endangered species.

But maybe that is the same thing.

Ipomoea vines are very invasive in Cape Town.

Don was visiting a small population of critically Penaea formosa. Formosa means beautiful. One idiot news outlet said it is an orchid. Sloppy Google search. That would have driven Don nuts. A symptom of the larger problem. Plant blindness. 


These moonflowers will open for weeks, until the first cold snap. Then their sappy, jungle green leaves will blacken. And I may be very sorry I planted them at all, back when spring's nights turned warm enough for the tropical vines' fat seeds to germinate.


But for now, under a waxing moon, more and more of the delicate flowers open each longer and longer evening. From spiraled bud to fullblown in an hour. 

Far away, in the Cape Town that exists as a concept for me, of home and friendship, there is a growing emptiness I do not know how to fill. Like more and more stars winking out in the black sky, unknown, unknowable, unstoppable. 

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