do you display dead flowers?
A Note: This letter is part of a series I write each month called I’m wondering. This series takes up a question on my mind and is available to all subscribers. To learn more about how this series came to be, you can read read here.
I used to make cards as a child. Birthdays, holidays, apologies, I would make cards for the occasion.
I loved going to the craft store and selecting fibrous, frayed paper and my parents kept me in a dizzying stock of scalloped pinking shears. My favorite type of card to make was one that involved pressing fresh flowers between the pages of Oxford dictionaries or Bibles that were stocked on my family’s bookshelves. After weeks, I would open the books and discover flowers that were crisp and fragile, their own kind of paper.
I would arrange the flowers on the thick cardstock from the store and then brush a glaze over the flowers that sealed them to the page, gave the flowers a cast and sheen that pleased me in such specific ways—the crags of the sealant, the flash-frozen color of the florals, the soft and rough-hewn edges of the paper that left a fuzzy feeling on my skin.
As I got older, after special occasions I would pin whole bouquets of flowers on my walls, some hanging for so long and getting so old they would disintegrate shard by shard until the realities of vacuuming became too much. Even now, I have flowers in all states from fresh and dying and dead in their vase on the living room table because I will not part with them, because I love their pink and green and violet vibrance in the heart of the room.
I do not know where all the cards I made are anymore—I am sure my mother has some saved in her memory boxes—but I do have one particular card saved in memory.
It was a holiday card I made for a friend of mine who I found unbearably cool—cool in the way that I wanted to be: effortless, unfettered, wearer of cream turtlenecks (while I wore black). I labored over the card with particular care, choosing the best flowers, the heaviest book to press them in, the most thoughtful application of glaze. When I gave it to her she was kind: exclaimed over it in the type of way that I had hoped.
But an hour later, what did I find?
I was in the washroom across from my friend’s bedroom when I saw the card I spent so much time on tossed into the waste basket. This was years ago. I think I was likely eleven? or twelve? but I still remember the feeling of seeing the card as a discarded object. A thing that was given now thrown aside.
I pulled the card out of the bin and looked at the flowers I had preserved and carefully arranged before sealing for further longevity. There was the sharpness of rejection—unavoidable—but mostly there was a sudden weight in my limbs which I conflated with the feeling of being adult. It felt grown to me to understand that there is no real way for any of us to truly know what one thing really means to another, that even if we tell someone what it means, they might not feel it, that sometimes this gap between what something means and what someone else feels is a chasm that whole relationships fall into. When I left the washroom, I left the card in the bin, just as I had found it.
I love floral arrangements, I am sure that is clear by now. It is the pleasure of beauty, the insouciance of blooms whose very purpose is to allure more life. It is also simply the heartstrike of joy I feel when I walk into a room and the living brilliance of flowers greets me. It feels like a personal greeting, all warm and bright and lush.
I want to follow that kind of invitation anywhere; I want to offer it in as many forms as I can to the ones that I love. I think it is why I will keep flowers for as long as I can, for as long as their forms hold. And I think it is why I loved preserving the flowers and turning them into lovenotes as a child. This is not the same for others, of course. Others do not want fresh flowers in the house.
They’re dying, they say and I always think: well yes, but they’re beautiful.
I know this is all a little sentimental. I know the flowers are always meant to be let go—I found the card I made where it was always going to be—it is just that I always want to hold on a little longer. Don’t we all in some way?
What we save is often so different from each other, but we all do it. One friend: playing cards found on kerbs; the other: old punk records; still another: miniatures of ordinary objects. One more: notes in her wallet that no one knows she’s kept. The earth moves to a pull that none of us can affect. Still we tend to the flowers, hoping that they will last.
What do you save? Or hold onto even though you know you will need to let it go?
Comment with your own answers (or if you want to respond privately: I hope you will write to me directly) and I hope you will ask me your questions so that I can write about them too.
Every card I’ve ever received.
I have dead, but still beautiful magenta peonies in a vase on my living room table as I write this. They’ve been there for months, and I adore them. I also save almost every card I’ve ever been given. I love when people write their love down. I return to them from time to time when I want the wave of nostalgia to wash over me, and especially when I want to remember the particular script with which my late Gramma signed her name.