Deep in the American South of the 1950s, my grandmother’s backyard was a wild, unplanned garden and home to many trees that I loved. Pecan trees, chinaberry trees, mimosa, black walnut, giant oaks. Then there were the crepe myrtles that bloomed in late summer at the same time as the spider lilies and canna lilies. Wisteria, fig trees and pomegranate bushes inhabited my world. For me as a child, these were fascinating beings full of magic and mystery. There was an old wisteria vine that grew all around and up in the limbs of one of the chinaberry trees, which became one of my favorite spots. I could spend hours playing there.

When I was four or five years old, my Irish grandmother often asked, “Where’s Angie?” Louella, who came three times a week to wash and iron clothes and clean the house for my grandmother, would answer, “She’s playin’ out yonder under the chinaberry tree, Miz Rauert.”

I loved those chinaberry trees, their clusters of waxy purple flowers with tiny golden centers that turned into round meaty berries, a favorite meal of birds. But it was the tall, old magnolia tree in my grandmother’s backyard that I loved best. Now I understand why—magnolia trees are goddesses. They are glamorous yet dignified, elegant and pristine. As a child I was fascinated by all of magnolia’s birth and death processes, every form and appearance of her life cycle. With studied joy and loving attention I examined her evergreen leaves. I quickly saw that, when she finally shed them, those leaves were beautiful in death, lying curled and crackled brown on the moist black earth beneath her low-hanging limbs.

Climbing into her reassuring arms was a great pleasure for me as a small child. Surrounded by magnolia’s thick glossy leaves I was cloaked, hidden, free to drink from nature’s overflowing cup. Perched on sprawling sturdy tree arms amidst all that beauty, I explored her liveliness in detail. Each leaf was a shining boat, smooth and dark green on top, golden brown and fuzzy underneath. Held in the hands and eyes of a child, a thorough examination of her leaves inspired going deeper, and what treasures I found in her bold flowers!

I wondered at magnolia’s joy—a flower sculpture of glorious virtue, sweet as cream, a paragon of purity, long velvet petals curling in sensuous repose around golden stamens and a central cone of complex nuance in brown, green, red, gold. Truly, magnolia’s magnificent flowers were a study in color and form. And oh, when I put my nose into her inner self and breathed deep of magnolia, her fragrance was heady, subtle, fresh, renewing my soul somehow in a layered complexity of scent. The aroma of her flower was complicit with a secret part of me that knew magnolia as my own self.

When I picked some of magnolia’s flowers, to my disappointment they soon turned brown. My grandmother explained to me that they are so very delicate, if you touch them with your fingers or your nose, they will turn brown. But if you carefully, so carefully, pick them holding only their woody stem, and do not touch them at all, then they will last for a day or two in water. And so I learned not to touch magnolia’s flower with my nose as I inhaled her fragrant blessing, and in this way I also learned to adore and worship her with attention and care, placing two or three at a time in vases on the round oak dining table to admire. I understood magnolia, for I too could easily bruise or stain from a careless touch. One of magnolia’s many teachings about life, empathy, and how to commune with fragile, fleeting beauty of all kinds.

And then there were the small birds that flitted into her branches seeking those thick, shiny red seeds—they hopped along in silence with a cheep or chirp now and then. They were talking to her and she to them. I rested in her arms to watch, see, smell, hear the life around me in my enclosed sanctuary, held within her world. When I was in the magnolia tree, my cat often sat on the ground below, then easily jumped up to the first low branch and made her way on soft paws toward me. She understood my great affection for magnolia.

To my surprise, my grandmother did not want me in the magnolia tree. I did not understand this strange edict coming from my beloved wise elder. Despite her admonitions, when no one was watching I would wander off to gingerly make my way up her branches, going as high as I could go, exhilarating in the thrill of it all, until my grandmother came out to the porch, scolding and fussing.

On one rare day when my grandmother was away, she left me in the reliable care of Louella, the kindest person I knew. I loved her unconditionally, and she loved me back. Between us there was an understanding. Thanks be to the mercy of whatever Polestar guided her, she did not blame me for being white, for being the granddaughter of the hard-working family for whom she also labored. She was African American—a term that did not exist in the 1950s in the Deep South. Her mother and her mother’s mother had also been household maids—they had served my mother and grandmother and great grandmother over generations. Their names were Louella, Versa Lee, and old Versa. They were part of my family’s mythic story.

My grandmother had a thick strain of the Irish in her blood—her name was Saleta Russell until she married my grandfather, when she became Saleta Rauert. Despite the terrible disparities of racism, she loved Louella like a best friend. They watched soap operas, gossiped, and sat together at the kitchen counter every day to eat lunch, while I was placed at the oak table in the dining room. I balked against this, because I wanted to be with Louella and Mawmaw.

“Why can’t we all eat at the dining room table?” I asked with the innocence of a four-year-old. My mother answered the question when she came home from work. It wasn’t good for Louella to sit at our dining room table. When I again asked why, she explained further, it would make people talk, and that could cause trouble for Louella and her family among some people. I would not understand this for many years to come. It was my first lesson in the heartbreak of racial bigotry.

My next big lesson came two years later, when Louella brought her daughter Anne, named after my sister, Judith Anne, to work one day. Her grandmother, who usually looked after Anne when her mother was at work, was sick. Anne and I played all day together, outside in my grandmother’s lush garden. I remember best standing beside the japonica bush, under a towering black walnut tree. We explored the hidden recesses, and I showed Anne where many different things would bloom as the season wore on—Chinaberry trees, with their waxy purple flowers, the pomegranate bush, honeysuckle, climbing roses, red spider lilies in the fall.

Anne, like her mother Louella, had shown me a treasure trove of kindness and sweet loving affection. Although my grandmother blessed me with her wise Irish love—she sang “Turah Lurah, Lurah, Turah Lurah Lai” and rocked me to sleep every night—she was also a fierce disciplinarian. I adored my mother, but she was burdened, working all the time. After she divorced my father when I was three years old, my mother was gone to work five days a week and came home exhausted at night. I longed for her, but she was forced to be absent. It was Louella who was there for me as just pure love. She had a magic touch.

One of my early memories is of Louella bathing me, changing my diaper, taking my little feet in her hands and kissing them, her beautiful nut-brown face beaming down into mine, eye to eye, heart to heart as she bent over to tend her baby girl. Nothing was held back in her giving of care to a child left alone while her mother went to work—just as Louella had to leave her little girl, Anne, at home to go to work. In later years, after I started at school, it was Louella’s soft, loving hands that cleaned me up, without a shred or hint of displeasure or reproving, when I was sick and threw up all over my nightgown. When I had scarlet fever. When my kidneys were infected, once again. She was pure acceptance, unconditional caring.

So, that day with my grandmother off visiting, I deemed it to be a good time to escape to the backyard and disappear into my favorite tree. I settled in happily but was soon called out of my reverie by the lilting music of Louella’s voice. “Miss Angie? Miss Angie! Are you up in that magnolia tree again? You know your Mawmaw don’t want you in that tree.”

My heart was easily warmed by the sound of Louella’s voice. Even so, I rebelled. Withdrawing deeper into the dense foliage, I hoped she would just go away and I’d be left alone in my favorite hiding place in the whole word—the place of hidden beauty. My special tree haven.

“Miss Angie! I know you up there. Come down out of that tree right now,” she called.

Silence. A little sigh. “I don’t want to come down, Louella,” I called out. Another silence. I could see Louella standing on the sagging grey boards of the back porch, faded apron tied around her waist. She leaned out toward me, straining a little.

“Come on now. Please, Miss Angie, come down out of that tree. If your grandmother comes home and finds you up there—she be mad at me. What if you fall down an break yo’ arm?”

I was torn. One of us had to be the victor in that moment. Was it going to be me or her? But I could hear the concern in her voice, and love won the skirmish in my little girl heart. The decision made, I climbed down, hands on smooth grey bark, swinging as I went, saying goodbye to magnolia—her flowers, her seeds, her glossy leaves. They were mine, after all.

When Mawmaw came home, she gave me a stern look and said, “Louella said you were in the magnolia tree again. I tol’ you not to climb there.”

“Why? Why can’t I climb in that tree?” My eyes clouded with unshed tears.

“Because that magnolia tree is very special, and you might break one of its limbs climbing in it,” she answered.

“But I love that tree, it’s my favorite place,” I struggled a little, squirming. No way I could explain why it was so important to be in that tree. Sadness descended on me like a blanket.

Seeing my discomfort, my grandmother relented. “I love that tree too, Angie,” she explained with firm patience, “I planted it. My mother gave that tree to me. It’s my tree, but you can enjoy it. Instead of climbing it, you can play under it all you want.”

Seeing something like loss moving in my face, she added, “And you can pick some flowers to bring in the house.”

My grandmother’s authority was absolute and final in all things. I could have argued some more, saying that I climbed the magnolia because the best flowers were up high, not down at the ground level where I could reach. But the look in my grandmother’s eye told me that there was really nothing more to say.

After that, my magnolia joy was confined to picking flowers now and then, whenever I found some blooming on the lower branches where I could get to them. I did not climb her again, but her memory stayed with me over the years. Now whenever I see a magnolia tree, my heart speaks a silent greeting to an old friend.

Most of all, my relationship with magnolia trees is entwined with someone who passed through my life for a brief time, whose touch left an enduring memory. She was a person I loved, who returned my love with great heaps of kindness. I have not seen Louella since I was ten years old, almost sixty years ago. She is probably gone from this world now, like the magnolia tree, my grandmother, my mother, and my childhood home. Even so, I remember her, give thanks, and wish her well, wherever she may be. And when I see magnolia trees, I think of her.