Flowers

In organizing my mother’s move to Ottawa, I went through a couple of desk drawers filled with papers. There weren’t many: she was always relentless in discarding things. When I was a child, I would watch her open a letter from her sister or her mother, read it once, tear it into four pieces and throw it in the fire. So I was surprised, and moved, to discover several file folders of my own letters to her and to dad, tumbled together, and spanning three decades of correspondence. And there was another file with a few more recent notes—almost like practice typing—including fragmentary drafts of a note to my Uncle Hugh. She used to call him from time to time; now he was mostly blind and semi-reclusive. 

February 20, 1995

Dear Hugh:

At Christmas time I did phone Jeanette to thank you for the lovely flowers. You were sleeping, so I didn’t talk to you. The plant was beautiful, just devastating, it still is lovely, a deep rose, pink, I have two lovely blooms left. I have been cutting them, and making arrangements. I love to have flowers for arranging. I’ve been happily cutting these beautiful blooms arranging them with some BC cedar and taking them for the long table at celebration dinners. I can bring them, put the stems in flower picks, and insert them in flower pots for my entrance. I’ve had a marvelous time and I have gained quite a reputation. One guy came over to the table to ask me what I was celebrating. I said, THE END OF CHRISTMAS!!!  

I included her glass containers and her various tools—wire, sheers, needles—in the belongings that we moved to her new life in Ottawa; and once arrived, I brought her flowers every week. In my ignorance, I began with pre-arranged bouquets from a trailer in the market—but the choices were limited and the colors garish, and one day I overheard her wondering whether “Jerry would know if the flowers were fresh.” So I graduated to Scrims on Elgin Street—one of the city’s long-established florists.  

I became a regular, choosing the most interesting new arrivals from the case every Saturday morning—lycianthus, freesias, wonderfully architectural carnations (such under-rated flowers), apple blossoms and quince (she always liked branches, and I recalled how she would force early blossoms when the snow was still on the ground, by bringing forsythia and pussy willow inside). Anemones were always my own favorites, with their magical name and twisty stems and their amazing depth of color and those open sexy centres. I discovered ranunculus—their prim cousins—along with tulips, a flower I’d always considered boring. How wrong I was: oh, the purity of those colors, the classical simplicity of that shape. In summer there were sweet peas and gladiolus—which don’t have to look churchy and conventional; you can cut them up and use their separate blossoms. Rarely would I bring daisies—such straggly beasts—and never, ever gerberas (too loud, too vulgar) or dahlias (same problem, only worse). And only chrysanthemums if they were green. Calla lilies yes; tigers never; sometimes the others—and rarely a rose. Always surprising leaves and never, never a hint of baby’s breath. 

But while she loved the flowers, she no longer took much interest in arranging them. So I did that. I learned to let the flowers speak. And as her dementia deepened, flowers and playing cards became our means of communication. 

When she moved to a nursing home in 2002, I thumbed through Flight of the Mind, the book in which she kept her cash, to be sure that no money remained in its pages. That’s when I found its hidden treasure: a single, undated typewritten page, written by her, at some point before her move to Ottawa. I’ve kept her always eccentric spelling, capitalization and punctuation: 

I have written this because I am having severe problems with my memory. I can come up with a blank at any importune moment.

A happy influence in my life was knowing Mia Obakata. A tiny Japaneese lady who loved flowers, and whose knowledge of them was infinite. Flower colours, shades, textures, shapes, petals, stems, leaves, branches. Flower needs; growing watering, cutting, handling and above all loving.

When I knew her she was about sixty, she had been in Canada for years, two grown and married children, Japaneese Canadians. Like so many women in those years, from a different culture she had been completely isolated from the Canadian community: spoke only a few words of English.

Mia had studied flower arranging in Japan. A graduate of many courses of the Sogetsu school the ancient floral art of Ikebana. Originated in the sixth Century A.D. A rigid discipline of lines, shapes, design, texture, ultimately to set off the beauty of every flower. She was a perfectionist, to say the least.

By some lucky chance she and Ann Cousins, wife of the botanist Wm. Cousins, specialism with peonies and Iris, met, as kindred spirits. Ann’s garden was full of flowers, huge peonies, and miniature ones, Iris, beds of special roses, rare Hosta foliage, small shrubs and trees, down to the last small Christmas rose and early anemonie. Lots of knowledge, love and care.

The endless enjoyment of those two working to-gether at Ann’s kitchen table and sink with their flowers containers and mechanics, Ann teaching Mia English, and Mia showing Ann the details of her art, sharing their marvelous feeling for the beauty of the natural material, emphasing it and cherishing it, with their arrangements.

Mia would never cut great bunches of flowers. From a field of daisies, or Queen Ann’s Lace or a wooded area, she would bring home only a few more than she thought she could use. I’ll always remember her light figure wading across a ditch and stumbling up a slushy snow bank, very inadequate foot wear on those tiny feet, to cut just the perfect branch she had seen from the roadside.

Mia became almost affluent in English in her one subject, but she would not teach without Ann at her side. She was a sharer, rather than a teacher. 

Her description of Mia Obakata is also a description of herself.  

I remember walking home from work one sunny late September afternoon. I turned the corner into Range Road and saw a little figure in a brilliant red coat and a yellow cloche hat, a block or so ahead. She was standing under a maple tree and staring up into its branches, her arms at her side, dazzled by the brilliance of its crimson leaves.

My mother. 

(More to come.)