Magnolia: Oakland style

The building I live in has an interior courtyard, a very controlled interior courtyard with potted trees and flowers and nary a nanosecond of wildness. It’s peaceful and reserved in a soothing, managed sort of way. It’s the kind of courtyard you might find, for example, in a very expensive hospital.

Occasionally, kids play out there. This happens mostly on the weekends, when parents drop off their kids to hang out with their grandparents. My building, though shifting in demographics over the past year, did initially have the aura of a Chinese retirement village. We can ignore the fact that, in China, the retired would mostly likely move in with their families rather than being given their own apartment.

But not long after I moved in, I turned off the elevator and walked past the window overlooking the courtyard. A flash of white caught my eye, and I stopped. That cannot possibly be a magnolia blossom, I thought.

I switched directions, went back down to the first floor, and went to investigate the tree more closely. Indeed, it was a magnolia, as is the other potted tree across the courtyard. These are trees that will remain restrained by their surroundings—they will never grow as big as a magnolia out in a yard. But the very fact of their being there was just another one of those high signs, those signals that confirm what you already know: You’re in the right place, and it’s exactly the right time.

The magnolias are blooming again, and now that I know to look for them, I see them everywhere in the East Bay and San Francisco. It never occurred to me that I’d find magnolias in Iowa, and it never occurred to me that I’d find them here. But I’m so glad to know that, even in Oakland, I can sit in my chair and look out my living room window at a magnolia tree.