Flowers – Are We There Yet?

I’m not one to complain about the weather. Why would I? What difference would it make? It’s like when you ask someone…usually an older someone…and often a male someone…how he’s doing. Sometimes he’ll answer, “Can’t complain.”, and a voice inside my head adds, “And it wouldn’t do any good if you did.”

Despite my physical aversion to colder weather, I never complained when spring took her time getting here. I adapted instead. I looked upon the situation as an excuse to purchase a few more sweaters with three-quarter-length sleeves. I love sweaters with three-quarter-length sleeves. They are some of my favorite things. I especially love them if they are made from cashmere.

One of my friends was particularly irritated by people complaining about having to wear shoes in Atlanta in April. As it happens, she was born in South Dakota. I don’t think she’s lived in Georgia very long which would explain why she isn’t aware that, by April, most southerners are organizing their flip-flops according to outfit and/or occasion. She took to Facebook, warning anyone bemoaning cooler temperatures that they had better not complain about sweating in July or she’d be there to remind them they’d gotten just what they’d asked for. I’m guessing she hasn’t had to make good on that promise. Not because she’s a particularly scary person. And, not because people finally realized that complaining about the heat doesn’t cool things off.

My friend hasn’t had to remind anyone how they wished for Atlanta heat because Atlanta hasn’t gotten hot yet…not really hot…not Atlanta hot. Atlanta hasn’t gotten hot yet because during the month of June we received 9 1/2 inches of rain. And, since that time, it’s rained every day in July. So far this year we’ve accumulated almost 42 inches of rain which is more than we had for the entire year last year.

Sometime around the middle of June people began to complain. Often, mine was the lone voice of dissent. As the minder of a garden, I didn’t dare complain. For years I watched my garden literally burn to the ground because of lack of rain. There’s no way I would complain now…unless it is to bemoan missing melons. I planted melons, you see, and something ate them. I assumed the culprits to be rabbits until I spotted a pair of deer strolling casually through a neighbor’s yard. They stopped, on their way down the street, to nibble on roses.

Back then, in the middle of June, when only about 30 inches of rain had fallen, melons seemed like a good idea. Thirty inches of rain is enough water to fill lots of watermelons. Now though, some twelve inches later, I’ve begun to see that too much of a good thing really is too much. A melon, you see, begins as a blossom. A bee spies the blossom, and then he sees another one, and another one, and so on, and so on, and before you know it…mini-melons! But bees don’t like rain. Even in a light rain, a bee can’t leave its nest. And a blossom without a bee is just a flower.

So much water in such a short time changes things.

The chicken pen is under water. Seeing their ugly little toes disappear into the muck time after time as they rush to greet me reminded me of jungle rot, a podiatric malady soldiers in Vietnam often battled. Last weekend I put down boards for them to walk on. My chickens haven’t had as much as a sniffle in six years. Its bad enough they’ve had to learn to eat off a dinner plate. I can’t take a chance with jungle rot.

My flowers are drowning.

My floors are muddy.

My dogs are smelly.

And, don’t even get me started on my hair.

I’m willing to concede that, aside from the health of my hens, most of my worries are negligible.

And then I read about the snakes.

It makes perfect sense when you think it through, which I never would have done if I hadn’t read that a local newscaster was hospitalized with a snake bite. The sequence goes something like this: many bugs don’t do rain which means things that eat bugs are forced to forage. Foraging, as it happens, often requires travel outside of one’s usual hunting grounds and, thus, increased time outside of the nest. Guess what eats the things that would eat bugs but are now having to hunt?

Snakes.

And, here’s another twist. Just like my chickens who now spend ninety percent of their time inside the henhouse, snakes are tired of being wet. Only they don’t have a house of their own, so guess what? That’s right! They’re not picky! They’ll use yours. Right now, in Atlanta, the average wait time to have a pest control company out to your house to remove rain weary vermin is two weeks; two weeks of sharing your house with something that slithers. No. Way.

My seventh grade teacher, Mrs. White, marched with Martin Luther King. She played guitar and taught us folk songs and regaled us with stories from her past. One story involved a snake. It’s the one I remember.

She’d gotten up in the middle of the night to pee. For whatever reason, she didn’t turn on the light in the bathroom until after she’d done her business. That’s when she saw the snake, coiled around and around and around the inside of the toilet bowl. Having carried this image around in my head lo these many years, you can believe I toilet with the lights on, and only after careful inspection. And there’s no loitering. When I was a kid, my father’s bathroom always smelled like newsprint. He obviously hadn’t heard the story.

Yesterday the rain held off until rush hour. This is not unusual. In fact, yesterday was the second time I’ve sat in traffic and watched marble-sized hail gather on my windshield wipers before being swooshed off to ping the car in the lane next to mine.

By the time I arrived home, hail had given way to torrential rain and pounding thunder. My dogs don’t care for storms. Usually they’re too nervous to eat. But when it rains every day for weeks, something’s got to give. Murphy, my boxer, followed me into the sunroom willingly enough but minutes later, after I’d gone back inside, I heard his super-sized claws hit the industrial strength screen we installed to protect the French door from just that type of abuse. He gave a jerk of his head when I opened the door; our signal that he wanted company. I sank into one of the rocking chairs I’d drug in off the patio during an earlier storm, and immediately wished I’d grabbed my Iphone. For a few seconds, I considered going back in to get it. I could play a word, check in on Facebook, or read an email. The sound of rain hitting the roof called me back. I realized this was an opportunity to just be, and I don’t get enough of those.

I give the rocking chair a push and fold my arms over my lower abdomen, appreciating the softness of a little extra padding. Looking around, I realize I never really see this room. I’d forgotten, for example, about the funky wine bottles and vintage tin signs I sat on shelves next to the ceiling. I’ve downsized from a plethora of plants to a table covered in cactuses and hung, above them, twinkle lights encased in aluminum stars separated by wind chimes. I’ve left my mark here.

The sound of azalea branches scraping windowpanes turns my attention outside the room. The wind is blowing. The sky is unnaturally bright. Maybe the sun, too, has had to adjust; taking any opportunity to shine.

I wonder how the chickens are faring. It’s cooler now, after the hail.

When did my head tilt to one side…ever so slightly…the way it does just before a nap?

When did my eyes close?

The rocking has slowed.

Sleep could come.

Would he be disappointed if I slept through dinner?

It seems as though Valentine’s Day always fell on weekdays when I was a kid. It feels that way because I have this image. It’s an image of my father, work-weary and possibly a little buzzed, leaning forward in order to catch the screen door with one mud-encrusted workboot. The lean caused the shopping bags dangling from his huge Dad-hands to swing, leaving flashes of red, and white, and chocolate in their wake. I fight the urge to clasp my hands in anticipation…

Mother’s box came first, and it was huge. Though he may have chosen pink on occasion, my memories are of red, bright red, deep red, heart red, love red. And white; white lace, the scratchy kind, bunched along the border. The largest of these heart-shaped, satin-wrapped boxes featured silk flowers in the center, roses, of course. As my mother tore through the plastic on the outside of this candy-stuffed work of art, my sisters and I leaned forward slightly, in anticipation of a chocolate waft.

She never ate one right away. There was no spontaneity to the way my mother chose chocolates. Should you have happened upon the still beautiful box even a day or two later, you would have found most of the candies pinched. She always pinched before she ate. She was picky that way. And, I couldn’t help but think that at least part of her motivation lie in making her candy less palatable to those of us with smaller hearts, emptied sooner.

In elementary school we made valentine boxes. At first, we crafted as a class. We bent construction paper, and scrunched doilies, and shot arrows through our hearts with red and pink crayons. Later, left to our own devices, the boxes became more ornate or, maybe, just more shiny. Either way, they were impressive…and, to a girl who feared her valentines would be few, somewhat menacing. As I slid my box between two others whose owners’ low expectations directed them to end of the table furthest from those expecting the most traffic, I began to devise ways to remove it with as little fanfare as possible.

There was always a party during which someone else’s mother served cookies or cupcakes. We drank red juice and peeled red foil from thick chocolate hearts.

At the end of the day, I’d jump from the bus and run up the driveway, through the door and up the stairs to the first bedroom on the left. Closing the door, I’d dump the contents of my now disheveled valentine box onto the folds of my unmade bed. My favorites were the ones with red lollipops threaded through the message. They had white hearts painted on them and tasted just like Luden’s cough drops.

In high school, Valentine’s Day was marked by the Band Department’s carnation sale. In what proved to be a stroke of marketing genius, strategically placed posters throughout the school suggested that carnations weren’t just for “couples” anymore. Carnations could also be purchased for friends, and at two-for-a-dollar they were a steal. The Popularity Derby was on!

In high school, Valentine’s Day always seemed to fall on a Monday. It feels this way because I have vivid memories of Sundays marred by an overwhelming feeling of embarrassment yet to be experienced, and dread. Or, maybe it was just dread, and the embarrassment is embellishment supplied by experience.

Flowers were distributed during homeroom when two or three flute players interrupted morning announcements with a tentative knock on the institutional door. I know they were flute players because flute players didn’t look like anyone else in the band. Flute players were exclusively female and cloned apparently, as all were thin, and wore their wheat-colored, stick-straight, long hair parted in the middle so that, at times, it fell forward in cascades, hiding, for just a moment, their carefully cultivated poetically pained expressions.

They flitted about the room, dropping carnations on desk corners, often making return trips to the same two or three desks, over and over, again. White carnations were sent by friends. A pink carnation meant someone wanted “to know you better”. Red carnations were the real prize, and usually only appeared on the aforementioned two or three desks. Occasionally a boy received a red carnation causing the boys with empty desks to shoot him glances filled with envy later hoisted on pointed barbs.

As it does for so many things, age takes the guesswork out of Valentine’s Day. It isn’t about wondering anymore. You either have a Valentine or you don’t. If you have a Valentine you get a valentine. If you don’t, you don’t. For someone who used to retrieve her box from the other end of the table with as little fanfare as possible, it’s a better plan.

Roses are a mainstay. I’ve received them singly and in bunches. They’ve been wrapped in paper, shipped in boxes, and presented in vases. I enjoy them presented, preferably at the office. After all, it’s not about the flowers; it’s what they represent. Whoever came up with the idea of shipping in boxes fails to understand the power of presentation.

And, while I like roses, I would trade every one, even the salmon-colored ones and the yellow ones with red-tinged edges, for a single tulip. A red tulip.

Today I woke to winter sunlight filtered through empty branches swaying in winds that carry the hope of spring. In front of the window sits a table and on the table a vase filled with a fountain of red tulips.

Category: Flowers

Unintended Consequences

>Valentine Red