The Deep Strangeness of Flowers in Winter
I wrote recently about the paper whites my wife brought home because she knows I like them. After they had started to flower out, she tied some thread around the stems to keep them from drooping. The plants were in a pot then, in soil, and she surprised me by cutting them the other day and putting them here on my desk, in a mason jar with water. They are still flourishing and gladdening my COVID winter heart. I never think of paper whites as cut flowers, but they work beautifully.
A red bouquet, too, sits on the kitchen table, with gerbera daisies, some mums, others I don’t know the names of. There was a rose. They are all red, making a big red statement. I heard once that if you were explaining the color to a non-sighted person, you could say it looks like the sound of trumpets. It announces its presence with authority.
In her poem “Flowers,” Linda Pastan writes —
The deep strangeness
of flowers in winter —
…unnatural
as makeup on a child.
It’s freezing all around us —
salt cold on the lips,
the flinty blacks and grays
of January in any northern city,
and flowers
everywhere:
in the supermarket
by cans of juice,
…notched tulips, crimson
and pink, ablaze
in the icy
corridors of winter.
I work in a grocery store and it’s so easy to just walk by them day after working day and not really notice. Assertive, in- your-face colors, defying winter. In the produce section, where they are merchandised, there is much care taken to provide what are called “color breaks” to emphasize each member of the ensemble. Not too many reds together, not too many greens or yellows in a row. So there are cucumbers, the stoplight trio of peppers, Japanese eggplant, maybe yellow summer squash, dinosaur kale, and squat pale rutabagas.
We crave light and color and smell and life and there is an environmental cost underwriting this extravagance in food miles and flower miles. We should not have tulips in New England in January, or asparagus from Chile either, but here they are.
And it’s easy to stop seeing them, easy not to notice after a while. A lot of life is about what we notice, what we’re trained to notice, what we notice by proclivity or habit. I walk into the store five days a week and, though I technically “see” them, the wowness slowly disappears over time.
Jack London’s character Martin Eden was a writer. He had decided “to turn myself into one of the eyes through which the world sees.” A noble goal, that, and I like to think that is part of what I do with these GratiDude posts. We all see and notice, we all hear conversations, but writers are the quirky ones who bother to write it down. It’s not a compulsion that is easy to explain.
But it occurs to me that we can be like Martin Eden for each other, writers or not. We can notice together, we can point out the daily beauties, even when all seems bleak and dark and common and blah. You can be the eyes seeing what someone else does not, as they can for you.
There is still wonder out there even in the icy corridors of winter.
Joy Harjo wrote — “Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.”
