Flowers and Things of Memory

Maybe I was a gypsy in a past life, or a nomadic herder, but things that serve no purpose other than to take up space are usually lost on me. Even if they’re pretty. So I throw out a lot of stuff. Thank goodness for second hand stores, for they have relieved me of much guilt of expanding the landfill. I just feel so much more healthy when I am not hemmed in by physical objects.

Yes, there are things that I don’t have anymore that I miss dearly. In a college metalworking class, I made a round, wrought iron and glass table that I no longer have. It had graceful figures dancing in a circle around a central globe. This particular table captured the essence of what I had learned in my college years – cultures, art, people, geography, creativity. It was one of my favorite creations and I was happy to have both made it and kept it. I gave the vast majority of my college creations away. But in moving across the country, we packed up the 27-foot Ryder truck and the things that didn’t fit went into the apartment dumpster. That table was one of them.

I didn’t mourn it then. I was happy to be rid of something that wasn’t quite level, whose corners weren’t evenly spaced, whose paint job could have been better. But every day since that day, when I think of it, it is one of the very few ‘things’ that I wish I still had.

There is a bouquet of dried flowers that lives atop the cabinet in my downstairs bathroom. My Aunt Katie bought them for me when I was almost 10 months pregnant. She was supposed to be visiting a new baby, but things were running a bit behind schedule. So we were sightseeing at Pike Market instead. The fish mongers, having spied my delicate condition in a very loud manner, “Dear God, are you charging that baby rent yet?” were attempting to induce labor by placing the hugely over-pregnant lady (that’s me) between them while tossing several whole salmon repeatedly over my head, leaving trails of fish slop in my hair. Their magic didn’t work, but it did elicit hoots and lots of attention for the fish guys who sold those “lucky fish” faster than normal.

Across from the fish mongers stood the flower stand, full of lovely Asian grandmas, arranging flowers in white five-gallon buckets. They were in perpetual motion, in an attempt to keep the buckets full and arranged at the same speed they were selling. Aunt Katie bought a bouquet of straw flowers, dried poppy seed heads and grass seed for me (it was October).

It has been lovely and collecting dust for the past 10 years. But just the other day a piece of it fell down to the floor and reminded me it was there. I relived the memory of the fish guys, the lovely day at the market, the flower-ladies. I even remembered our bumpy ride to Mt Rainier (while 10 months pregnant, since we weren’t ogling the newest addition to the family yet). And I considered throwing the dusty, crunchy, faded bouquet out. But it’s hard to throw things out that have a memory attached to them, because it feels like throwing out the memory. So the bouquet sat another week in the bathroom, falling apart, some stems clinging to other flowerheads, frozen in their attempted suicide off the high cupboard.

Then my expunging pseudo identity reared her sanitizing-self and demanded that the messy flowers be removed from existence. She pulled them down from their home of 10 years, collected the few that were behind the toilet, and stuffed them in a plastic grocery bag. Ooh, I hate her sometimes!

In response, the everything-loving, destroy-nothing identity returned and guilted that sanitary creature by writing this post, instead of letting her continue to clean the bathroom. And the memories flooded back again. Once again, the ‘things’ have a chance of being pulled out of the trash and reset in their resting place of the last ten years, to collect more dust. But it depends on whether I can decide that the memories will live on after the flowers have gone.