Flowers

The return of joy

I would go when I had somewhere else to be or something else to do. I would be driving by the road to the cemetery, and it would hit me. I’d turn around and head back toward the cemetery and cancel wherever I had been headed. It seemed to only happen that way. I couldn’t bear to plan it, but suddenly the need to do so left me no choice.

I would swing a wide loop over to the craft store, first, to pick out silk flowers to take to her. There, I would devote a whole hour to walking the aisles, through the endless flowers. I’d mix-and-match. I’d start over a few times. I’d pick something to add to the bouquet, a ribbon, a sign, a card. Something tiny that the weather might not destroy. The bouquets grew bigger and bigger each time. I’d drop $100 on fake flowers I would never see again.

Until, once, the day after I left an enormous bouquet on her grave, my father reported they were gone. Stolen. My heart seized for a moment, but somehow it rolled over me. I had already derived pleasure from them — and what did my mother care?

It was a moment of realization. The flowers weren’t for my mother; they were for me. 

Suddenly, they became my private pleasure. My hour, shopping, her favorite thing to do, looking for her favorite thing — flowers. I cherished every outing, my mother on my mind, her laughter, our summers, the deep magenta of her favorite impatients. I slowed down in that hour and forgot everything else. I paid attention only to my intuition. What I felt like picking up, I did.

I put greens and reds and crimsons together at the holidays. In the spring, it was tender whites and audacious baubles of lilac. My mother loved to pick out flowers, and I felt sometimes she was helping me find spiky plants to pair with overabundant blossoms. I loved this, when I felt in sync with her, the choices coming easily and with joy.

Other times, though, I would have to stop.