sketches in flowers

I have a love/hate relationship with flowers connected in odd ways to anger, sadness, and loss along with the more normal expressions of love, beauty, devotion.

My father had to go to Germany for several weeks just a month or so after we first moved to Mohegan Lake, leaving my poor mother behind in this big new house in a strange new neighborhood with two little kids to look after.  Most tragical to me, of course, was that he missed my seventh birthday, but he did have a bouquet of flowers delivered to me that 21st of June -- a bunch of white carnations in the form of a cupcake.  I don't know why I remember this, but I do know that I've never liked carnations.

My father also always brought a bouquet of flowers to my orchestra concerts in junior high and high school, and this always made me feel pleasingly adult-like even though I wasn't even a particularly grown-up teenager.

One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to spend entire afternoons poring over my mother's bulb catalogs and picking out a couple different kinds of bulbs for the fall plantings in anticipation of spring. The Angelique tulips, which came up year after year near the fireplace behind the house, were always among my favorites, along with the sweep of bright yellow daffodils that Dad so treasured, scattered across the rise in front of the tennis court in the front yard.

One year my mother let me order some bulbs to plant down at the lake:  mixed daffodils for their longevity and tendency to multiply, grape hyacinths for their early color and general cuteness, Grecian windflowers just because I loved them.  Friend Cindy and I spent an entire afternoon that October sipping milky tea out of thermoses and digging happily away in the dirt. The windflower bulbs were unearthed by hungry rodents later that winter and the hyacinth bulbs rotted in the ground during the spring thaw but the daffodils... Apparently a handful of daffodils still come up every spring, and even though my family left that neighborhood fifteen years ago some of the neighbors still think fondly of us come April.

I love purple, yellow-tongued irises, as mentioned here before.  I think they are probably my favorite flower of all, going back to 1989 and the farmers' market near our little Paris apartment:  the wonderful Maubert-Mutualite market and the armfuls of purple irises I carried home from there most Tuesdays and Saturdays.  They looked so cheerful, caught up in bunches in glass bottles on our wooden table, sun streaming in the huge living-room windows and glowing around them and falling across the tiled floor.

I once managed to make an old boyfriend so angry, so enraged, just moments after he walked in the door with an armful of purple irises, that he screamed and hollered and jumped up and down in wordless fury and ripped them to shreds and flung them all over the apartment.  I guess I knew how to push his buttons, and for weeks afterward we would find remnants, scattered little shards, of this sweet gesture gone so terribly awry.  I didn't get flowers again until last November, when I walked in from work one day to find the cutest little orange & yellow daisy bouquet awaiting my arrival on the kitchen island -- a sweet farewell from another boyfriend on the eve of a month-long sojourn in Spain.  (That's not entirely true -- I've gotten lovely little birthday bouquets and hostess bouquets from friend Susan over the years, a woman of enduring etiquette and impeccable grace.)

Two days ago, just this past Monday, former office-mate and dear friend Erica arrived for dinner, arms full of jauntily-wrapped book and paper-wrapped flowers.  I knew from the look on her face as I moved in to hug her that they could only be purple irises (one thing about having an office-mate become such a dear friend is that she's had to endure the worst of my stories again and again, and came in to the office day after day during the winter of that particularly nasty break-up to find me in tears over this, over that, over nothing at all, and somehow absorbed it all without giving up in frustration, hands flung up in the air).

She explained that these were a late birthday present, and that she'd been calling the florist on the corner of 181st almost daily waiting for them to get in some purple irises, and that they finally had come in that morning, and so here they were.  And there they sit while I am here at work, those stately purple irises caught up in baby's breath and the warm afternoon glow of my living room, just waiting for me to walk in on them cheerily absorbing the early evening light.