Balloon flowers (Platycodon grandiflorus) are said to have come originally from China, Korea, Japan, and Russia. They prefer temps in the 60-80 F range, but can do OK in warmer weather if provided shade. I planted mine several years ago in a spot where nothing had done well. I tried balloon flowers because they were described as easy to grow and I am lazy. The spot is perhaps a bit shady for them, but it does protect them from hot afternoons. They spread slowly by self-sowing their seeds, but they are not aggressive. Despite my trend towards native perennials, I see no need to remove them.

I enjoy watching the pale green balloons turn to puffy pillows then to wide-open blue stars. For me, there is something comic as well as beautiful about its transformation. 

Recently I noticed that I was born under a thin crescent moon, just one night after a new moon, at the end of October 1951. The moon probably set unseen, since it flurried snow that evening in the mountains of North Carolina. Daddy drove from work in Charlotte to the hospital in Jefferson. Mom was 18. She had graduated in the spring already pregnant with me, just a few months after she and Daddy had eloped to South Carolina. Daddy had turned 25 just eleven days before my birth. He was probably the dominant person in my life for the next twenty-six years until he died by his own hand in December 1977, just one night after the new moon.
 
That my birth and his death occurred under the same phase of the moon is a meaningless coincidence, of course, but it illustrates how we live at once in both cyclical and linear time.
 
A well-known nursery rhyme lists the milestones of Solomon Grundy’s life; milestone suggests a road, a linear arrangement of time. But Grundy’s milestones are distributed in an order determined by cyclical time, the days of the week:
 
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
That was the end,
Of Solomon Grundy.
 
If I remember correctly, I learned the rhyme from my sister, who I believe learned it as a rope skipping chant. The rope skipper who proceeds down the sidewalk, sing-songing the rhyme as the rope cycles around her, does a fine job of illustrating linear and cyclical motion and time. The events in Grundy’s life fall in succession on the seven days of the week, corresponding to the seventy years allotted to human life in the Hebrew Bible. Given that Grundy’s illness and death take up four days of the week, it is not surprising that the poem has the somber tone of Psalm 90:10: “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away” (New International Version).
 
The beginning and ending of Grundy’s life dominate the poem's timeline. Two days for birth and christening and four days for illness and death leave only a single day—“Married on Wednesday”—for healthy maturity. The primacy of the beginning and ending recalls a phenomenon known as “serial position effects in memory.” These effects include “the primacy effect and the recency effect, by virtue of which people tend, respectively, to recall early or later items in a series or narrative better than middle items.” [See the note]
 
I wandered into these musings as I was working on my memoir of my father (nine parts have been posted, beginning here). My father told and wrote stories almost entirely about his childhood and youth, though a few stories took place in his early married life. He wrote only a page or two about his approaching end, painful pages to read. My writing about him has been dominated by his childhood and my childhood and by his death. I sometimes think I have written him—his beginning, my beginning, his end—out of my system, but the need always returns.
 
NOTE
“Serial position in memory”—Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon's Missing Stories. Greg Kofford Books. Kindle Edition. Footnote 16 to “Introduction.”

“It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.”—Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, 1999), 85.

After a six-day trip home to see my mother, I arrived at home yesterday evening to see the first buds on a milkweed I planted last year. 

Also greeting me, from its perch on our sidewalk lamp post, is my  friend of 14 years standing, a clematis. Three or four times each year, it dies back then blooms again. Its most beautiful season is spring. 

Like the milkweed, I planted the penstemon last year after completing my wall to nowhere, and, like the milkweed, it is blooming for the first time.