Except for a little thing written out of gratitude and sadness for a teacher, I’ve already fallen out of my weekly writing rhythm (though I never meant to write that much, anyway). I’ve had friends and family in town, and then I’ve been spending the interval of Julian’s good nap wallpapering the downstairs bathroom, hanging one drop per day. I also had my return to public poetry life mid-April, with two readings, one at the Shaker Lakes Nature Center with Jill Bialosky and one with Noah Falck at the Cleveland Public Library. Both were wonderful; both made me grateful for such interlocutors, for poetry, for the beautiful spaces in which the readings were held. One of them was attended by an audience of exactly one person. It’s not that I mind, at all—I love reading out loud. I’d read to a room full of empty chairs and feel glad to have done it. But I had been looking forward to my poetry resurrection after a fall of readings, and then after it I felt strange and unsettled. Part of this is a well of abject anxiety about placing a couple of finished manuscripts, but part of it is that I’ve been tremendously happy, it turns out, making faces at the baby and matching up the beautiful gold-edged cranes on the bathroom walls. A return to readings made me grumpy, antsy, and discontent. Maybe I’m just in a season for this kind of domestic work?
Anyway, what I wanted to write about, which is not unrelated to my preference for wallpapering over poetry at the moment, are flowers. I think it’s safe to say that it’s finally spring in Cleveland. I know this not because the weather is reliably warm or sunny (it’s not) but because the flowers in the garden are going strong. My house is 110 years old this year, and it came with a garden I did not plant. In this garden I did not plant, there is a confounding glory of color that starts up in March: snowdrops and grape hyacinths first, then hellebores and daffodils, two kinds, then some lilacs and a flowering ornamental quince whose fruit has no smell and no taste but whose orange-pink flowers make a decent substitute for the blazing azaleas in all the colors of wild-berry skittles that I miss from the south. Then a couple of days ago our own azaleas bloomed—some white and some purple, still pretty if a little puny, past peak already. This is about where we are at the moment. As the season turns toward summer, there’ll be hydrangeas and peonies and tiger lilies and some kind of blue indigo thing, and clematis, and mock orange, and more some things I’ve already forgotten about. But this isn’t a post about gardening—it’s about flowers.
I did not grow up in a household where flowers indoors were a thing. Mostly I remember flowers from family funerals—the sickening smell of calla lilies, especially, a smell I still hate. Maybe once or twice my parents donated a poinsettia or lily plant to the church, which meant we got to take that plant home in its plastic pot wrapped in flimsy red or gold foil. A couple of times I think my father bought my mother a flower arrangement for an anniversary or for her birthday, but both of these fall in the middle of winter, and the offerings were modest at best. Presented with flowers, anyway, my mother is likely to complain about them: flowers are a waste of money, an ephemeral frivolity. Also they drop pollen and leaves and little vegetal bits—they make a mess and serve no purpose.
I started buying flowers for myself one summer when I was living in Paris, working as a residential assistant for NYU’s summer in Paris program. This job came with housing in the dorm-like “residence” in which the students lived—a studio, with its own bathroom and kitchenette, clean and central and completely functional, unlike my other Paris apartments of that era. The problem was that, unlike in those other apartments with their creaky floorboards and stacks of books beside a mattress on the floor, I couldn’t figure out how to make the space feel like my own. It was like making a hotel room feel like home—you can’t, the whole point is that you can’t. That summer, for the first time in Paris, I had a tiny bit of extra money. The first time was impulse, and then it became a habit: I’d go to the market on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir and buy the cheapest bouquet they had, a bunch of these small odorless stiff-stemmed things whose name I never knew, some filler that resembled tiny dyed chrysanthemums, two or three euros at most for a big bouquet of them. They’d last a week or more in a big mug on the fold-out table. In an extended season of turmoil and rootlessness, they felt like an indulgence, like an act of setting up a home—a gesture, if nothing else.
The weekly flower indulgence is something I keep up now, thanks to Trader Joe’s, although I worry about the provenance of my flowers, and whether they are sustainable or ethical. I still buy the cheapest things, or almost—real chrysanthemums, sunflowers, peonies, ranunculus when they have them, Gerber daisies. I buy their “big bunch” of tulips, 20 stems, and divide them into two tall jars to put in two separate places in the house. What I’ve come to think about flowers is that they only work when they’re an extravagance, and for that, they need at least to seem over-the-top, extravagant, everywhere, frivolous. When we had a small and bafflingly untraditional baby shower in the winter, our friend Katie sent a whole box of loose gardenias from California. They arrived on ice and I set them out in bowls and vases. I’d never smelled gardenias before. They were everywhere and heavenly. This is how flowers inside are supposed to be.
This is the paragraph in which, in a different kind of writing, I’d adduce a bunch of literary examples of flowers as indulgence, flowers as ornament, flowers as some kind of statement of aesthetic autonomy, although I don’t actually believe that exists. But these days I have time to read or write, not both, and part of the point of this writing—call it recovery from graduate school, call it homage to Brian Blanchfield’s magnificent Proxies, call it the problem with doing most of your thinking pacing around the house with a creature strapped to your chest who doesn’t want you to stop pacing to find a book that’s probably in your office anyway—is giving myself permission not to cite all the good thinking about flowers that I know is out there. I read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence for the first time last winter, and I loved the textures of her flowers—opulence, intrigue, luxury all the way down. I’m pretty sure that there’s something good in Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty. I have a feeling there’s something in Stevens I want to think about. Although I can’t gracefully get the rest of the Four Quartets in here, I keep coming back to Eliot, to the roses in “Burnt Norton,” which “[h]ad the look of flowers that are looked at.”
Right now, in any case, the loveliest of flowers are in my house: a pair of anemones I got from the Shaker Square farmer’s market and carted home in the wind, delicate-looking but incredibly sturdy, with their navy blue centers against their cream-white petals and their frondy petals, going strong since Saturday, plus my tulips, white this week and not quite open. And more, for I have reached a new stage in interior possession and arranging of flowers—I don’t buy them but I simply pick them or snip them from the yard—a couple of branches of that quince, taken from the back of the bush right before the flowers have begun to fade and put into a jar of water. Who knew you could do such a thing? These, of course, are In homage to Jorie Graham’s magnificent poem about such flowers, these “salmon-pink blossoms brutal with / refusal of / meaning.”
It’s Labor Day today, and there’s so much in the world that’s pulling me out of this little domestic orbit of control and prettiness—so much else to write and think about, so much heartbreak in concentric spheres that radiate outward from here, bigger and bigger. But in the spirit of Labor Day, maybe it’s worth insisting on the tiny labors of beautifying and of home-making. The luxury lies in being able to do this work, in having the energy and the attention to notice and gather and arrange and refresh and replace, picking what’s about to fade so that it lasts longer, stripping off the lower leaves, running cool clean water, setting the jar on the table by the mirror so that the flowers reflect and, doubled, seem to fill the room.
I just died over Burnt Norton’s roses last week! How lucky to have inherited a flower garden.
💐