White Hydrangea

White hydrangea.

There was a summer when I was visiting a friend at Yale. This was a good summer, an innocent summer. The flowers littered the lawns of the houses surrounding the campus, blink and it’s just a white bush, a white picket fence addition. Perhaps they couldn’t hold a candle to the magnificent stone buildings on campus.

But they’re just so luscious. My photographs show the sunlight illuminating them as if from the inside.

They smell like nothing in particular, I’ll admit. They almost can’t compete with the pink and blue bushes of the same type, but they have a virginal quality. Colorless, untainted. There’s an innocence.

My friend would look at the white bushes and say: so pure.

And they were.