When we pulled into Momo & Granddaddy’s home the full magnolia tree was the first thing I always saw. The picture above is not the actual tree but it resembles it. Roots were often massive and often surfaced. The grass did not grow much underneath. The broad deep green leaves of the magnolia abosrbed the sunlight. If the weather was cool I found cones underneath. If warm, there were cream-colored flowers on the branches, white flowers pungent when I smelled them. (When I smelled magnolias I did not forget them. Like honeysuckle on hot summer days I don’t think I would ever want to forget that sweet smell.)

Today as I drove to my apartment where I am away from family due to being in the military, I passed a general’s manicured grounds. The estate was replete with oaks, dogwoods, and magnolias. And suddenly I was a boy again–climbing the magnolia at Momo and Granddaddy’s place, where the garden was twenty meters east of the tree, directly behind the house, and Grandaddy’s corn grew in rows, as did the butterbeans, okra, squash, and tomatoes. His gray gloves were draped over the backporch handrail, and his pronged hoe lay propped at an angle beside his work boots and straw hat.

Inside the door, Momo fried fatback in a black cast iron skillet and she and Granddaddy had us sit around the formica table and hold hands and pray before we ate the best food I’ve ever tasted. I did not know it then, but I was being fed–not just prayers of amazing grandparents, not just butterbeans and peas and Vidalia onions from the soil just outside the backdoor, not just love from women and men who’d survived the Great Depression and known life without electricity, but I was being fed my deepest riches.

The magnolia, the garden, the garden tools, the smell of my beloved Momo when she hugged us and we believed that all would be well because she was there, and my soulmate Granddaddy, with his arthritic hands and black Scofield Study Bible, and the way he’d laugh, and they way he’d eat cereal before he went to bed in his blue pajamas–it was all there. All of it. Richness but not in dollars. In impact and in love.

To you, dear ones, I will never be able to repay you sufficiently. You were precious. Like the corn and tomatoes and the countless hours in which you worked literal and spiritual soils, you reaped impacts. You still live in me, in us, in those you reached. I can never see a magnolia, or touch a hoe or rake, or eat fatback at a buffet, and not remember that all things were sweeter, richer, and better with you. Words won’t reach high enough to tell how much I miss you. Even the magnolia in spring, cluttered in white, fails. But you did not fail. No, you were precious. And you reached heaven.