The Pinkster Bush is outside our kitchen window. This year many of the buds didn’t survive the freezing temperature one night in May. But some of the pink flowers still bloomed infusing the air with the most luscious smell each time I walked out the back door.
A few nights ago I saw the reflection of the small pink flowers, through the window filling up my shadowy self. That’s when I took this self-portrait.
Last year when I put up a picture of the flowering bush growing outside the back door, I got so many responses about it. The Pinkster bush seemed to bring up memories, most often including grandmothers and their gardens.
That’s when I found out the bush was a type of azalea called a Pinkster. And when I googled the name, I found it was related not to the color pink but to the Christian Holiday of Pentecost which occurs when the bush blooms. The Dutch word for Pentecost is Pinxter.
But It wasn’t until I was reading Katilyn Greenidge’s novel, Liberite last month that I heard about Pinkster Day.
The story is inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the country. It takes place in Brooklyn NY and Haiti in the years before and just after the civil war. It’s about Libertie, the doctor’s daughter, who is struggling to find her own place in the world as a young freeborn black woman.
In the book, Greenidge includes many historical references, and one of them is Pinkster Day.
“Pinkster was what the old ones celebrated, the ones who had been alive for slave days here in Kings County…They all spoke in the strange singsong accent of old New York. They had celebrated Pinkster when they were young…”
In the book Greenidge describes how Pinkster Day continued to be celebrated by the free Black people in New York on Pentecost. The children would make gingerbread and gather azaleas and make huts using dried grasses. There would be drumming, singing, and dancing. It was the one holiday where they would drink cider.
But when the Black people who lived in New York were still enslaved, Pinkster Day was the one day during the year when families who had been broken apart by slavery could reunite.
“The old ones spoke of it as a release, as if it existed outside of time, and none of them mentioned how it used to end – with the men and women returning to their masters, saying goodbye to their loved ones owned by other men, with sometimes nothing but a blade of grass tucked away to remember them by, until they met again, the following year, if they were lucky.”
Last year when I googled Pinkster no information came up regarding this holiday. Today, I found so much information about Pinkster Day I’m not sure how I missed it last year.
The holiday was outlawed in New York in 1811 but it was revived in 2011 and since then there have been celebrations in some of the state parks in Albany (only an hour from the farm) and other places around the country.
I think, next year, when my Pinkster Bush blooms, I’m going to make it to one of the Pinkster Day Celebrations nearby.
You can read more about Pinkster Day here.
It was Pam who gave a name to the bush with the pink flowers that smell so good outside the back door.
“They remind me of blossoms on a beloved “pinkster” bush my mother had when I was growing up.” She wrote, “The scent was absolutely incredible and I could never get my fill of it. I’m wondering if you might have the same bush”.
I had never seen this kind of bush before we moved to the farm. But I was awed the first spring we were here and it bloomed all pink with a smell that I had not experienced before.
So after reading Pam’s message I immediately googled Pinkster.
I found that the word Pinkster doesn’t have to do with the color of the flower but comes from the Dutch work Pinxter which means Pentecost. When the Dutch settled in the Hudson River Valley they named it that because it blooms during the Pentecost, which is a Christian Holy Day.
This made me wonder what the Native American name for the bush was, but I haven’t been able to find that yet.
Pinkster or Pinxter bushes grew wild where we live and people started digging them up and planting them in their yards. They are pretty rare around here now. I’ve never seen one growing in the wild and have only seen a few on the property of old houses.
So when the dogs started digging around my Pinxter I knew I had to do something to protect it. This weekend I filled in the holes around the bush and placed rocks around it to keep the dogs away.
I am determined to keep my Pinxter Bush alive and healthy.
Although I had my iPhone and sketchpad, I didn’t take one photo or do one drawing on our weekend away. It truly was a few days of doing very little, focused on being together.
We did lots of reading, (I finished Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea and started Kelly Links’s short stories White Cat, Black Dog) napping, and eating good food.
Back home, so much is the same, so much has changed.
We stopped at a nursery in Vermont and Jon got some more flowers for his garden. He wasted no time planting them. When one of the blossoms fell off his begonia he saved it for me knowing I’d want to put it in water.
In the house, I filled up a small blue jar with water for the flower.
That’s when I saw the bright yellow bird, on the Pinkster bush out the kitchen window. I watched it hop from one branch to another and suck a bright green caterpillar into its mouth. It stayed long enough for me to observe its markings and discover it was a Yellow Warbler.
After bringing in our bags and letting the dogs out, I went around the house opening the windows. I found this dead Milkweed Tiger Moth in the dining room window. I wasn’t surprised to find it, because just outside the dining room window, a few milkweed plants are growing in the Hosta patch.
The donkeys greeted us at the gate. I noticed right away how much Lulu had shed because I could see the white around her eyes. I bushed off handfuls of her and Fanny’s hair.
Before filling up the water bucket, I fished this beetle from it. It was so small I thought it was a gnat. Only when I focused my iPhone on it could I see it was a beetle. It was tiny enough to have to walk up and down the wrinkles on my fingers.
I was delighted to see it flutter its wings before drawing them back in again.
And when I opened the barn door, a pigeon flew off the nest. I climbed up the ladder sure that I’d find two more pigeon eggs. And there they were, two pinkish eggs in a clean nest refurbished with hay from the barn floor.
But the pigeons aren’t the only birds laying and hatching eggs.
I heard the familiar chirping when I went to muck out the barn and as the barn swallow swooped past my head, I looked up and there were two scrawny heads with wide open beaks stretched over the edge of the nest.
Now we’re all unpacked and the clothes are drying on the line. We’re home, but I feel like we’re still on vacation time. Jon is napping surrounded by the dogs, I think I’ll join them.
Bud has the patience of a cat.
He has several places around the yard where he sits and waits. Sometimes he’s at the front fence ready to bark at the Amish horse and wagons as they go by. He prowls the hosts bed, disappearing under the huge leaves hunting chipmunks and voles. He sits at the thick roots of the maple tree, head up looking for birds and the squirrel who lives there.
Also like a cat, he finds the shade in the summer and the sun on colder days. He’s out all day this time of year, running and warning people and animals away, shedding the weight he put on to keep him warmer in the winter.
The yard is Buds territory and he’s very serious about protecting it.
Now I hear it.
The ice, like rain against the window. Only it makes a different sound, hard and sharp instead of soft and round. Then the familiar creak and swing, only faster than usual, of the steel hook that holds my Yes/No Dress which hangs outside my studio.
Later when the wind comes from the west, it will be the tapping of the carpet tacks that stick out of the dress like thorns, on the clapboard.
The wind comes into my studio too.
First, though the yellow clapboard where, for a moment, it fills the space between the outer and inner wall. Then it’s pushed through the unfinished Wainscott walls of the old schoolhouse.
I hear it before I feel it.
In another moment the whole building seems to rock a little, the walls groan with the sound of wood separating.
It’s here I think, the ice storm that’s hitting more than half the country.
Then it’s quiet again. Almost too quiet.
So I go back to work and wait.
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