Confessions of a Woman Who Bought Her Own Mother’s Day Bouquet

Jean spent an hour staring at her keyboard, waiting for a theme to behave itself and show up. It finally did, wearing petals. Maybe it was the Mother’s Day bouquets stacked on the concierge’s desk, or the tangerine roses she bought herself, or the memory of a Tom Jones look‑alike sending her miniature rosebuds decades ago. Whatever the reason, flowers marched in and took over—as they tend to do in Jean’s life—demanding to be written about….AI

I’ve been drinking coffee in front of my keyboard for an hour, and I hadn’t written a single word until now. No theme was jelling in my head until I decided to write about flowers. Saturday I’d been over to the other building, where the concierge’s desk was completely covered with Mother’s Day floral deliveries. Except for one bouquet—the one our resident retired lawyer sent to all the ladies here at the Continuum Care Community. He does that for every holiday, and when I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, he said it makes him happy. I replied, “It makes us happy too.”

Never being a mother, I’ve never gotten flowers for the holiday unless you count the tangerine roses I bought myself last weekend. If anyone asks about them, I’ll joke that they were from the dogs in past chapters of my life: Levi, Cooper, Jason, Sarah, Cindy, Jody, Scottie, King, and Blackie. With the exception of the two dogs from my childhood, they all had human names—which should tell you something about the surrogate‑baby relationships I had with the dogs in my life.

When I met my husband, I was working as a floral designer and continued for another decade into our relationship, giving me access to all the flowers anyone could want to bring home. So my husband got in the habit of never buying me flowers, especially given the fact that it took me five years after I left the floral industry before I even wanted fresh flowers back in my life. By then the mold was set. No flowers from Don. He was also not known for giving romantic gifts. Long‑time readers might remember the time he gave me an auxiliary gas tank for my pickup truck for Valentine’s Day when I actually longed for a single red rose. More precisely I longed for the symbolism of getting a single red rose. Yes, I was one of those women who thought a soulmate should be able to read my mine.

Other than corsages for proms way back in high school, no guy has ever given me flowers—with one notable exception. Back during the first six months after meeting Don, I was also dating one of his friends. I’ve told this story before, but briefly: the three of us often found ourselves hanging out together on Fridays after bowling. It was where we all met on the same night. His friend looked like he shared the same gene pool as Tom Jones. His first name was even Tom, and he had the same voice quality. He took full advantage of looking like the famous singer in his fashion choices. “It's not unusual to be loved by anyone, It's not unusual to have fun with anyone, but when I see you hanging about with anyone, It's not unusual to see me cry…” Oh my god, I can still see him serenading me with that song. Tom made the bold move of sending me a bouquet of two dozen pink miniature rosebuds to the flower shop where I worked. Don’t think that didn’t make a splash—seeing a delivery van from another shop bring flowers to one of their employees.

Romance novels (and later, movies) have programmed women for a couple of centuries to be wooed with flowers. And I suspect one reason the custom has held up as long as it has is because it’s an easy gift to give a woman for holidays and special occasions. Easier back in my day when a guy would call up a flower shop and get something delivered. They can still do that, of course, or they can just go to a supermarket and pick out a bouquet themselves. I’ve seen guys at Meijer struggling to choose just the right bunch, and I struggle not to jump in and help them.

The kids of many of my fellow residents here must have the nearby flower shops in their contacts lists, because it’s not uncommon to see deliveries on our concierge’s desk waiting for the recipient to come down and pick them up. And no one seems to be in a hurry to do so, giving everyone a chance to check the card to see who it’s addressed to—a sure sign someone is having a special day. My oldest niece has made me the talk of the day on several occasions, and I have to admit it’s a good feeling to have everyone ask who sent the flowers and why. Not to mention the fact that I really do love having fresh flowers in the house. And I make them last, reworking arrangements as some of the flowers wilt and others are still good. For example, the greenery in the bouquet above is what was left over from my mid-April birthday bouquet. Its the third reincarnation. Last week that greenery was the backdrop for three tulips that were given out at a Memorial held here for one of my mahjong players. 

A few people scoff at their kids “wasting money on something that doesn’t last,” but to me a CCC is the ideal place for fresh flowers, for the same reason they’re so appropriate at funerals. Flowers remind us of the cycle of life. “To every thing there is a season…” When you think about it, flowers don’t truly die—they still hold seeds within their dried-up blooms that could spark life again. When I had a house with an open field-like area in the back I'd bury the heads of flower shop flowers and many of them did come up. And, who knows, maybe the Great Unknown does something similar with some unseen essence we leave behind.

At births and weddings, we use flowers to symbolize growth and our hopes and dreams for the future. At birthdays and anniversaries, they remind us to cherish our benchmarks. They are life‑affirming. The connection between the timeless cycle of birth, growth, and transformation and flowers may be symbolic, but it’s pure perfection in the realm of symbolism.

But even though I was formally schooled in the language of flowers at Hixen’s Floral Design School in Cleveland, Ohio, as a young woman who once received a bouquet of miniature pink rosebuds—known to symbolize innocence and the new beginnings of romance—all that went out the window when they were delivered. I was as giddy as any other young woman that my coworkers saw proof positive that I actually had a boyfriend. And that’s only one example of the power of flowers.

Maybe that’s why flowers still have such power, even after all these years and all these seasons. They don’t last long, but they don’t need to. Their job is to remind us that beauty is worth noticing, that love is worth expressing, and that every life—even ours—keeps blooming in ways we don’t always see until someone hands us a bouquet. And if that bouquet happens to come from a niece, a neighbor, or nine dogs with suspiciously human names, well… the heart doesn’t care. It just opens, the way flowers do. © 

 See you next Wednesday. But if you get notices by email from MailChimp I'm not sure how long it will be before they will start in again. The A to Z Challenge messed them up. I'm on the free service and I don't have enough credits built up yet to get back to my normal schedule.

O is for Overtime—When Work Was Just What You Did

 

A few posts back in this A to Z Blogger’s Challenge, I wrote about my dad working long overtime hours during WWII, and that got me thinking about all the overtime Don and I worked over the years. At no point in my adult life did I ever have a tidy nine-to-five job like Dolly Parton sang about in her 1980 movie song with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

I never “tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen” to pour myself a cup of “ambition” before heading off to a predictable shift. In the floral industry, where I worked for twenty years, there was no such thing as nine to five. We worked when there was work to do. Funerals, holidays, and weddings didn’t care what time the shop or greenhouses closed. Brides often needed evening appointments, and grieving families needed casket sprays and pedestal pieces with gold-foil letters proclaiming labels like “Mother” or “Grandfather.” Those letters are still the same fonts they were sixty years ago. And yes, I still have the same hand-held Clipper #700 stapler I used back then. The letters, however, now come with sticky backs.

Funerals were unpredictable, but weddings guaranteed overtime on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Not ideal for my man‑hunting days. (Girls who met their spouses in high school or college missed the era of wondering where on earth you’d find a decent man.) Most of the guys I worked with were either married or gay. One was deep in the closet, circa the ’60s. With my hours, my default social life became Sunday skiing or after work bar‑hopping with two single co‑workers—a gay girl and a gay guy. None of us ever found what we were looking on those after work bar hops. Surprise, surprise .

We did have some fun after hours, the kind you can only have when management is nowhere in sight. Flowers came in from all over the world, and once in a while cockroaches hitched a ride. One shipment must have included a pregnant one because they multiplied fast. When we told the boss, he said the monthly spraying would take care of it. We didn’t want to wait. So we trapped a dozen in a jar and planted them in his desk drawers. The next morning, he walked into his office with his coffee and came shooting right back out like the hounds of hell were after him. That night the chemical guy was waiting for us to punch out. The boss? We didn’t see him again all day, and he never found out what we’d done.

Holidays were the worst for overtime. My bosses did wholesale as well as retail, so we prepared artificial arrangements by the hundreds to ship to four states before switching to retail fresh flower orders. We also decorated houses—inside and out—for wealthy clients and big parties. Twelve-to fourteen-hour shifts weren’t unusual. I learned early on to finish my Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. I also learned that if I wanted a break, I had to learn to drink coffee, because my boss didn’t like the image of someone sitting in the break room “doing nothing.”

When I left that job, I started my own weddings‑only service out of my home. A one‑woman operation with part‑time help from my nieces, my mom and Don. Anyone who’s ever had their own business knows who ends up working the longest hours. After ten years of that—and more than a few Bridezillas—I gave it up and went back to college, which I wrote about in E is for Education. At the same time, I worked part‑time for Don, plowing snow in the winters and doing parking lot maintenance the rest of the year. He had five or six part‑time workers, but it was he and I who worked the most overtime. Exhausted was our default condition during the nineties. Oh, and did I mention he also worked a full time job at GM where, went we first met, they had a lot of mandatory overtime?

Those years blur together now—the late nights, the early mornings, the holidays spent working instead of celebrating. At the time, it all felt ordinary, just the way life was for us. Maybe that’s the thing about overtime—you don’t notice the hours until you finally step outside and see how far they carried you. ©

The First Anniversary

Writing by orders or dictate has never been my thing. I can’t for example dash off a poem to stand up and read at our first anniversary of the continuum care place where I live. Ya, I was asked to do that at a party being planned by the Resident Council. Have I mentioned lately how glad I am that I didn’t agree to be part of that group? I was also asked to help with floral arrangements for all the tables and I used my hand surgeries for an excuse---as if I needed one beyond, “No.” Why is saying ‘no’ to someone so hard to do? The guy in charge of planning the party is an old florist like I was but he’s barely mobile. He’s appointed himself to decorate the lobby for the seasons and holidays and anyone who helps him ends up doing the leg work, hauling stuff up from his storage unit. I’m still mobile enough to do it but I’m either a selfish person who doesn’t see the point of doing for free what the management of the place should and would have paid a service to do before Mr. Florist got involved or I prefer my low key persona where I watch the action rather than be the action. 

Guys like him, I’m guessing, have their self-worth more closely tied to their past professions than most women in my generation. We measure ourselves on different scales at different points in our lives. At least I do. I measure myself in terms of emotional grow and life experiences rather than what I did to put food on the table. He says he still loves making floral arrangement because they make women happy. Being a woman I get that. But being a floral designer is just something I used to do, it’s not who I am anymore or who I want to be. I suppose if I’d had an esteemed career I might feel differently and I’d want to flaunt it. But---surprise, surprise---we’ve had an astrophysicist on campus from the beginning and I couldn’t have picked him out in a lineup until this week. He squirrels himself away in his apartment writing a book about astrophysics which disappointed me; I’d hope our not-so-mythical author who was rumored to be pounding away on his computer was a fiction writer and he’d want to share his passion for writing in my creative writing group. Nope. He’s a serious man on a serious mission and more power to him. He could give lessons on saying ‘no.’ When he told me what the book was about I said, "I'm guessing that means you don't want to join our creative writing group?" He laughed and just shook his head.

The anniversary party does sound fun, though, if they can work out the differences of opinion on whether or not it should be a fancy-dress up event---kind of like a prom for old people---or if ordinary go-to-church-on-Sunday clothing will do. The latter seems to be winning at the moment but The Council will let us know before October fifth. Then I can decide if it’s worth getting a cobalt blue silk blouse/maxie shirt I’ve had since the ‘70s dry cleaned or not. I’ve adored that shirt for decades, but I’ve never wanted to wear it where I might spill something on it. But I’m eighty-freaky-years old! What am I saving it for? Jewel tone colors are my friends. I could live in royal blue, magenta purple, jade green and ruby red. Throw in a lot of black and white and I just might redo my wardrobe to reflect what I always wanted to be: Queen of the color wheel.

There are three women here who hang out together and usually wear black and white and when they enter a room one is in the front with the two others fanned out behind in a V-shape like superheros on a comic book cover and I’ve taken to calling them The Force. If you've seen the movie, Queen Bees you’ll be able to picture the women who always draw attention where ever they go. And I have no idea why I’m putting them in this paragraph other than to say I think The Force ruined my go-to black and white outfit for when I want to look nice.

One day, I promise, I’ll quit talking about updating my wardrobe and actually do it. I did buy two cashmere turtleneck sweaters from L.L.Bean---one black, the other one gray---and a ruby colored, Jessica London vest plus a gray cardigan crew sweater from Land's End  that I'll end up buying in multi-colors if I don’t keep my credit card tucked safely out of reach. Can you tell I got cold on a day when I had too much time on my hands? That cardigan sweater makes me feel like Patti Page without the traffic cone breasts that women seemed to grow back in the ‘50s. Someday I am going to drag everything out of my closet and only put back what I truly love and when the day comes I’ll blog about it. Before I die I’d love to have a wardrobe that looks planned rather than bought willy-nilly. Ya, I know I've recycling that dream over and over and over in my head to the point it feels so real I don't actually have to act on it. Don't tell anyone but that's my super power---day dreaming. Always has been, always will be. ©

* Stock photo above of Patti Page, 1955

Valentine’s Day at the Continuum Care Complex

 

First off let me say that because I’ve been a widow or a caregiver to a stroke survivor who couldn’t go anywhere by himself or handle money on his own, Valentine’s Days since 2000 have been whatever I thought up and bought myself. Which was usually just candy and flowers. Nice but not as nice as getting the “surprise” card and gift from someone who loves you. What I’m trying to say in a round-about way is I’ve grown accustom to thinking of the holiday as one for the young at heart and those who promote it.

 Valentine’s Day here at the CCC lasted several days starting off with a game called the No-So-Newly Weds which was a take off of the old TV game show named The Newly Weds. We were told there would be five mystery couples and, of course, it was the topic of a couple of meals who those couples would be. All but one couple were residents and the fifth couple was our CEO and is wife, who won the game by matching the most answers. They’d been married 40 years. One couple was married 70 years, another 60 and two at 50 years each. Two couples couldn’t match any of the ten questions they were asked. The questions were stuff like: Where did you go on your first date? Who would your spouse say is their celebrity crush? What would your spouse say is their most prized possession? and What would you spouse buy first if he/she won the lotto? What surprised me is how few of the guys could name two things correctly that their wives would have in their purses. It was a fun afternoon’s entertainment.

The weekend before the 14^th T-shirt Tom had a large and very beautiful bouquet of roses of various colors sent to the concierge's desk with a card reading “for all the ladies.” (Found out recently that he is also the person who keeps a dish on the concierge’s desk supplied with tiny candy bars.) The bouquet looked like spring and made my heart happy and my head thinking about the days when I made bouquets like that for the flower shop where I worked. Only back then we didn’t have the high-bred colors they have now. It was quite amazing and must have cost a fortune. Another resident, Bing the Scottish singer, brought two dozen still-warm holiday decorated Crispy Crème donuts to our group dinner table that same weekend.

One day we all found a small Valentine’s Day card in our mailboxes from the management and for a week they’d been advertising a special meal that was served in the fine dining room on V Day. Surf and Turf, with asparagus, champagne and two to-die-for sounding chocolate desserts. I didn't go because I’m allergic to lobster and the meal was pricy, especially if you can’t eat half the entrée but I was able to score a box of chocolate covered strawberries made by one of our chefs.

Also in honor of the holiday the CCC had a guest speaker who has built a business for herself out of giving historical lectures and escorting bus, running and walking tours to various points of local interest. This presentation was on the “Great Romances” in our city. I’m kind of burned out on her, having heard her speak at my old senior hall many time plus I’d heard this talk before so I almost didn’t go. Then I decided I needed support the management when they bring in outside speakers so they’ll keep bringing them in. And really, what else did I have to do on the 14^th that was so pressing that I couldn’t take an hour to walk 100 feet to the next building and hear her again?

Me? Her over-the-top (fake?) enthusiasm is starting to grade on me but I didn’t mention that to anyone here because I remember when she was a shiny-new penny on my life’s landscape, and I am duly impressed by how this young woman started off eight years ago just doing running tours in our downtown area for people in town for corporate conferences and now she’s got 33 programs on her menu of talks and full service tours she can give. I had a front row seat when our senior hall director mentored and helped her branch out from her small niche to what she does today. And Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to celebrate the power of women helping each other as well as remember those who we love or once loved. ©

My latest jigsaw puzzle. Another made by Bgraamiens named Retro Art Squares, 1,000 pieces bought at Amazon. I'm fast becoming a fan of this company. Not as hard as it looks but still took my three days of obsessing.

Another Valentine’s Day Under my Belt

After a long stretch of dreary winter days, Valentine’s Day was so bright and beautiful I had to put sunglasses on as I drove home from the grocery store and serendipity brought Travis Tritt on my radio singing “…it's a great day to be alive. I know the sun's still shining when I close my eyes.” I was feeling good. I even had one perfect red rose with baby breath in the back seat as well as a heart shaped box with three pieces of chocolate candy inside. Heck, if there’s no one else around to treat me, why not do it myself. I love me, right? No crime in that. 

While I was picking out the rose a young man was near-by and he was studying one miniature rose plant after another trying to decide which one to buy. The ex-florist in me wanted to ask him if I could help because I could see he was leaning toward plants that were nearly bloomed out and the ones with a few flowers still in bud would last longer. I laughed at myself when it crossed my mind that he might think I was trying to flirt with him if I offered my opinion. Me 70-something and him 30-something. Dream on, old lady! My second thought was that I should write a note for him to give to the recipient of his gift, telling her she’d better appreciate the thoughtfulness he put into picking it out. He was as serious as a Tibetan monk as he studied his choices. But I had my own perfection to find and that’s not easy in this day and age when supermarket cut flowers are so jacked up on preservatives that they often don’t open. I hate that. 

When I got home I went to my Facebook page. I rarely post anything there---a few animal videos just to let people on my friends list know I’m still alive. Mostly I go there to read my news feeds and look at family photos others post. But I had something I wanted to share so when Facebook asked me “What’s on your mind?” I wrote: “It was on a bright, sunny day just like today and I was selling Valentine's Day flowers in the middle of the mall when Don came strolling in after plowing snow all night. He ended up staying to help me and he was so good with the customers. If that isn't love, then I don't know what love is. Still miss you, Don!” That day at the mall is one of those days that comes floating back to the surface when I’m trying to decide exactly when and where I was when I first knew I was in love with Don. I have five-six memories like that fighting for first place on my love-smacked list.

Like all couples, I could also conjure up a short list of memories when I wanted to kick Don to the curb. But there’s something that happens to many women when we get knighted with our WIDOW titles that diminishes memories of fights and hurt feelings and changes them into regrets or comedy skits. Not long after Don died I was in the toothpaste aisle at the grocery store and a couple was arguing over what brand of toothpaste to buy. I had a hard time resisting the temptation to step in between them with my metaphorical referee’s whistle and telling the couple to buy both brands, for crying out loud! “Isn’t having a peaceful marriage worth four bucks and a little extra space in your medicine cabinet?” I’ll never understand why people argue over trivial stuff like that. We never did that. Ya, right. It’s too bad there wasn’t a newly minted widow around the day I picked a fight with Don because the night before I had dreamed he was cheating on me with a woman who looked like Jennifer Anderson. Back in the days when Friends was the hot TV show he developed a crush on her that lasted his entire life. How does a guy defend himself against a dream? See what I mean about how fight scenarios when viewed after death could easily be turned into comedy skits? The mind is an amazing place when it’s trying to justify our own illogical behavior. 

Valentine’s Day night I dreamed something with details that are fuzzy to me now but when I woke up in the morning I was happy and I knew Don had come to visit me in my sleep. Often times my sleeping life is richer and more fun than my daytime life. And if the need to pee didn’t wake me and force me out of bed, I wouldn’t mind living in that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness. Too many mornings I throw my legs over the side of the bed and sit there for a few minutes dreading the long, lonely day ahead. I don’t know how to fix that feeling when it comes… ©

Flowers and---Well, More Flowers

 

If you want to feel old really quick go to a lecture on Victorian flowers, fans and calling cards and when the costume curator from the local museum asks for a show of hands of people who know about the “language of flowers” raise your hand. I was one of four in an audience of over a hundred people who knew people in past centuries used flowers to send messages about feelings they dare not speak out loud. So why would one go to a lecture like that? For me, I got intensely interested in all things Victorian through reading historical romance novels but even before my decade of torrid reading I got hooked on Victorian furniture in my twenties, when I bought a Victorian parlor set at an estate sale. One would never guess that now, looking at my cowboy and Indian themed living room. The only thing Victorian left in the house is a table and lamp banished to the spare bedroom.

Back to flowers: I actually learned about the language of flowers before my Torrid Reading Decade. It was introduced to me at floral design school back in mid 1960s and when I first became a wedding designer in the floral industry. I actually did have a few customers in the early days who knew and wanted to incorporate the language of flowers into their weddings. The museum curator took the language a step farther than anything I had read before in my handy dictionary of flowers and their meanings by explaining why some the flowers got their “secret” meanings. For example, a peony translates to ‘shy’ and most liking got that meaning because to open they need ants to help them…shy to meet the world without help. The language of flowers actually goes back centuries before the Victorian Age and some plants, like mistletoe, still hold on to their original folklore meanings today.

Fortunately or unfortunately---I can’t decide--- before the lecture I had already purchased a bunch of plants to put in a narrow space in between my garage and the sidewalk leading to the front door. Otherwise I probably would have ended up with Scabiose aka The Devil’s Bit aka pincushion flowers stretching the entire twenty-two feet. You never know when a kick-back-to-the-past suitor might come knocking on my door and the pincushions would tell him that a widowhood lives inside. It would be like a flashing warning signal, “Beware, the person inside lost her love!” Instead, I’m confessing my love with moss roses mixed with hens, chickens and succulents. It was kind of funny watching my lawn care guy and his help plant those plants. (I can’t get down on my hands and knees with my three fake joints.) One started planting at one end, and the other started at the other end. I could tell they weren’t going to match up. Sure enough, one end had to be done over. When the guy asked me which end I thought looked better thus would stay as planted, I said, “Your end will look best the second half of the summer and her end will look better the first half of the summer. How's that for a diplomatic answer?”

Not much else is going on here on Widowhood Lane this weekend. Same old rigmarole. Jeez, do people even say that anymore? I suppose they do in the form of ‘same old same old.’ My dad used that word---rigmarole---a lot and I haven’t thought about it in years. It’s just as much fun to say now as when I was a kid. I miss my dad. He was such a wise, gentle and compassionate guy. He could see the best side of anything or anybody. Being this is Mother’s Day weekend I should put in a good word about my mom as well. She was a strong person with many talents whose growing-up years were extremely difficult and they made a pretty good team. ©

Mom and Dad