Arranging Memories

I have been doing crafts for as long as I can remember, harbouring new obsessions and passion projects. I cycle through them every few months based on my inspirations. More than anything, the people in my life inspire me to do crafts, either because they have a special interest that I think would make a fun project, or because they taught me that specific craft. I’ve made hand-woven scarves and bookmarks based on my loved ones’ favorite movies, decorative instruments out of metal wire for my brother, and even attempted to crochet dragon costumes for my cats, though they refused to comply. I spend most of my time thinking of loved ones while I craft, relishing the memories I have shared with them. Few memories hit me quite as hard as those doing crafts with my mother and grandmother. I inherited both my creative passion and attention to detail from them. My mother has as many creative interests as I do and introduced me to many of my hobbies, but my grandmother had a specialty, she was a florist. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a genuine craftswoman. Maw-Maw was a florist. Though I never knew her as a florist, it was truly her passion and she maintained it as a hobby through the years, across careers, and into her retirement. Flowers were one of the main ways Maw-Maw connected with the world, both as gifts and by teaching her art to her family as a means to spend time together. My mother and I were two of her most avid helpers and students, as we enjoyed projects as much as Maw-Maw. To this day, when I think of Maw-Maw I think of flowers. Her voice rings in the back of my mind every time I caress a lily or catch a glimpse of a daffodil as I drive.

As a child, I spent every Sunday and several Summers at my Maw-Maw’s house. During these lazy days with Maw-Maw, we’d watch TV, tend the garden, play with the toys from weekend yard-sales, go swimming, and while away the time playing card and dice games. Every now and then, she would have one of her flower arranging days, and, eventually, I began to help. Or, at least, I thought I was helping her. More accurately, I would play with flowers beside her as she made the real arrangements.

Flowers reigned supreme at my grandmother’s house, grandchildren coming in a close second. Not only did she grow flowers around her house, but she also kept multiple plastic tubs of silk flowers, styrofoam, and vases in her attic. Any time she had an excuse, she would pull out all of her supplies. Or, rather, she would send one of her grandkids upstairs to fetch it for her. Once ready, she would settle down in her signature spot at the eight-person dining table and begin systematically sorting through her supplies. In the beginning, I would just sit beside her, in my Paw-Paw’s chair, and watch, but the longer I watched the more I wanted to understand methods to her madness.

First, she would pull out her arsenal. Then, she would consider the purpose for her project. Was she arranging for a wedding, baby shower, funeral, holiday, or gift? When relevant, she would search for a vessel that would best fit that topic and a styrofoam piece to fill that shell. When she didn’t need a basket or a vase, such as if the vase already existed and she didn’t have it with her, the flowers would live in a plastic cup until it was time for them to reach their new home. Once she had a container, she had to decide how to fill it. She would choose her flowers based on the season, the target’s favorite flowers, what complemented the other flowers she already chose best, and so on and so forth. After she had enough to work with she would take them in her hand and start moving them around, trying to get a general look she could approve. Armed only with some wire, wire cutters, floral tape, green stem pieces, and a pair of terrifyingly old scissors, she would set about her task. She would make lightning fast decisions changing one flower for another, and making quick cuts without a second thought, as if it was her nature. Considering how slowly she approached other things in her life, this speed was shocking and difficult to keep up with. Maw-Maw always had a vision, and all she had to do was make it come true.

By the time I reached middle school, my lessons were starting to take form. I would select all of my favorite flowers from her reject pile and start fiddling with them beside her, making arrangements in my tiny fists or leftover vases. Especially when I was younger, I always overcrowded the vase,forced more and more flowers in until no more could fit. Or, I would hold so many that they would start to fall out because my hands couldn’t hold them all. I couldn’t help it. I thought that they were all so pretty and deserved to go on display. After I deemed my creation worthy, I would beam at my grandmother and show her what I had done. Every time I did this, her eyebrows would fly up her forehead and she would start cooing over my work, telling me what a great job I had done. Afterwards, she would try to give me some advice about how to avoid overcrowding the vase, showing me how to add greenery or baby’s breath to create negative space so your eyes could actually focus on the flowers. Every time I would meet her gaze and nod as if I understood, only to tear apart my creation and create an equally, or even busier, work of art.

My obsession with multitudes of flowers did not stop with reorganizing the silk ones, but followed into my love for fresh flowers. Maw-Maw’s house, at least in spring and summer, was always adorned with hanging baskets. Dozens of plants would line the walls of my grandmother’s house, vegetable garden, and driveway. Yet, despite how many there were, she could always tell when one went missing and would often accuse my grandfather of intentionally running them over with the lawnmower. She and her friends would often share flowers from their garden that were outgrowing their spots, though I remember her accepting many more than she ever offered herself. Once, we even went to salvage the flowers left behind at a burned down house that belonged to one of her friends . My aunts, mother, cousins and I were armed with spades and shovels, doing most of the heavy lifting for my grandmother, as she directed us to the best spots to dig, warning us to be sure we didn’t break the bulbs. After the harvest, we all got to divide the loot, before going back and helping my Paw-Paw plant Maw-Maw’s new acquisitions around the house. Every time, he would complain that they didn’t have any more room to plant.

Maw-Maw would often wander outside, picking flowers to liven up the wood paneling interior of her house and bring in a little extra color. Helping her is how I learned to cut flower stems “just so,” i.e, at a perfect slant to make them last longer. So, when I asked her in first grade if I could pick some of her flowers to make my teacher a bouquet for teacher appreciation week, she smiled, handed me her ancient scissors, and said, “Of course!” I trotted outside and headed straight for the line of buttercups—more accurately known as daffodils—growing by her driveway. By the time I walked back to the house, I had picked Every. SINGLE. ONE. Needless to say, it was a very long time before I was allowed to pick flowers by myself again.

As the years passed and I practiced with Maw-Maw, her advice eventually started to sink in. Still, in my stubbornness, I would sometimes… or frequently... insist that I liked it better my way. Over time, however, I got better. I started to see the beauty in her techniques, and the works of art she created. I learned how to adjust the stems so that there were no longer monstrous height gaps between my flowers, how to blend colours and achieve a sense of balance. Maw-Maw’s criticisms lessened over time and turned into slight adjustments. Insead of suggesting an overhaul, she would switch a flower or two, trim the stem on the center rose, or even just pull off unnecessary leaves. Eventually, I was no longer creating my own pieces for fun as much as helping her make the real ones.

I was honored to be her assistant. We would be simultaneously cutting, wrapping, rearranging, passing equipment back and forth across her giant dining table, hidden under flowers and leaves. I would try to model my work after hers without recreating it. Maw-Maw was very precise that no two arrangements should be identical or symmetrical, or they would never look natural. When I would pass her my finished product, she would often approve and make a few small changes, or occasionally none at all. The more she approved of my work, the more confidence and pride in the craft increased. For important events, her dining room would become a tiny factory with Maw-Maw, my mom, and I sitting around the scattered table for long hours, making arrangement after arrangement.

Our skills were put to the test every Christmas. Maw-Maw’s Christmas arrangements were legendary. They were very simple, mostly filled with live green pine and poinsettias. We would gather around the giant table with endless piles of real pine and poinsettias to make arrangements for the family, church, friends, and anyone else my grandmother could think to give them to. By the end of the day, we would all be covered in sticky sap and pine needles, our hands rubbed raw from the bark. Half the house would look about as messy as the three of us. Across the house would be an army of carefully stacked arrangements, each adorned with a giant red bow.

My grandmother attempted to teach almost every one of her granddaughters how to make her Christmas bows, but most were not patient enough to spend hours practicing only to watch the ribbon unfurl in front of their eyes. Maw-Maw had spools of identical ribbon, always one-inch thick, velvety on one side and smooth and shiny on the other, in the exact shade of Christmas red my grandmother loved. No other ribbon would do. You were supposed to twist the ribbon so the velvet was always on the outside, and create at least a dozen three-inch long loops around the center point. I can still remember the hours I spent trying to make just one perfect bow while my grandmother worked next to me producing dozens. While I easily mastered the art of sliding ribbon down a pair of scissors to create a perfect spiral, I struggled to make the bountiful loops of Maw-Maw’s Christmas bows. I would endlessly try to make one, undo it and start all over again until my ribbon was so wrinkled that my task only became more difficult. I can’t remember if I had ever seen my grandmother look so proud of me as the day I finally got one right. I had to use thinner ribbon, because my fingers were too small to use the normal thick-inch version, but there it was: A perfect miniature recreation of her Christmas bows. Maw-Maw then clipped a piece of wire and carefully slid it between my thumb and the ribbon, twisting it a dozen times to make sure it held tightly before sliding it off my thumb. After the holidays, I bought myself a spool of ribbon and spent the next year practicing, just so I would be prepared for next Christmas. I still have some of that ribbon and my first Christmas bow stored away at my parents’ house.

After every Christmas, we would raid the stores to buy discounted flowers and ribbons for the following year, a tradition I have continued after every major holiday. Our flower arrangement days often came with field trips. Not only would we go to friends’ houses to amplify my grandmother’s garden, but we needed to replenish her stock of silk flowers. On Sundays, we would often scan the salespapers of craft stores to see who had the best deals on everything. During the week, we would hop store to store buying cartfuls of flowers and mountains of ribbons at each. Sometimes she would even buy flowers just for me. She bought me a few dozen flowers when I decided I wanted my room to be decorated in a monochrome blue, and also bought me supplies to make arrangements for teachers or friends.

Sadly, not every flower is for a happy occasion, and therefore not all adventures with Maw-Maw were quite as happy. As a child, I couldn’t understand why shopping for the arrangements with tombstones was less fun than other sprees. When I was about nine, I helped my grandmother arrange flowers for her parents’ and brother’s tombstones. When the time came to deliver them, I thought I was brave enough to go to a graveyard. I had never really known these family members, and I thought I understood what happens to people when they get old. We got to the graveyard, and it was fine. The graves were close to the main road, so we didn’t have to walk far. My grandmother carefully kept me off of the graves, demonstrated how to show respect and explained that we had to pull the premade arrangements out of their red solo cups and lower them into the marble vases built into the headstone. Everything went well. Everything went very well, until Maw-Maw pointed beside her parents’ gravestone to show me where she and Paw-Paw would be buried. I held it together but was a little shaken about thinking about people I was close to passing away. Since I was so strong, she showed me my parents’ plot next door and I instantly started bawling. Rather than tell me it would be a long time before anything bad happened, or anything else comforting, my grandmother thought it more wise to tell me that everyone dies and it is a normal part of life. She added that one day, I would die too. She instantly realised that forcing a child to confront their own mortality was potentially not the wisest idea, so on the way home she bought me a milkshake to make up for it.

As Maw-Maw grew older, she began having problems with her eyesight, her memory, and her hands. Slowly it became more difficult for her to do her favorite things, gardening, card games, and, worst of all, flower arranging. While she still enjoyed making flower arrangements and desperately wanted to continue, it became a struggle. At first she just needed more help to cut the thick stems or work the delicate wire, then as time passed she took on more of a supervisor position. Slowly she brought down the flowers less and less. My cousins outsourced more flower arrangements for big events like weddings and Maw-Maw favored to do fewer and smaller arrangements instead. Since gardening was hard for Maw-Maw, my mother started the tradition of buying her hanging baskets, since they added beauty but no effort.

To this day, every time I work with a bouquet I feel like I’m back at Maw-Maw’s kitchen table, only now it’s my own voice giving myself orders. I should cut the hydrangeas shorter so they can serve as a base for the other flowers, but I should also break it up with some baby’s breath to add some extra dimension and white space. I put too many tulips together, and there is too much pink in this one area, here just a few of the red and yellow tulips there to break it up, and a little bit more pink on the other side for balance, and voila. It feels like magic, as I try to conjure up mental images of my grandmother’s past decorations, wondering if she would be proud of my latest creation.

My mom and I began to foster the activity more within ourselves as well and find our own creative spins on the discipline. My mother, for instance, has taken her flower arranging skills to make intricate ribbon, ornament, and other accoutrement-infused wreaths to decorate for the holidays. When I moved to a bigger city and no longer had a garden, I would occasionally buy myself bouquets, only to take them home and re-arrange and re-trim them to my liking, still following Maw-Maw’s laws of floristry. When I have access to fresh flowers, I still pick them in accordance to how they will best fit in my vase, planning which ones I want to be center-stage and what will best compliment them before I cut them . During the lockdown last year, I would take long walks and harvest wildflowers to help keep myself sane during the months locked at home. Within the first few weeks, it became a habit I looked forward to. To help curb the absence of fresh flowers in most seasons, I started preserving those I do have. Once I have pressed flowers, I incorporate them into my daily life. I turn them into bookmarks, art, and hide them in my “treasure chest” memory boxes. So over time my flower arrangements turn into preserved memories. I saved a jasmine blossom from my first day visiting another country, a wildflower from an ancient city, and many, many flowers from the floral arrangements at Maw-Maw’s funeral last month.

After Maw-Maw passed, one of the most important topics of conversation among the family was what flowers we should have at her funeral. My family ate outside, talking and reminiscing under the hanging baskets she had received just weeks earlier as Mother’s Day presents. People asked what her favorite flowers were and we debated for days. Everyone thought it might be something different, Irises, Roses, Poinsettias, and many others. Eventually, my grandfather simply said, “All of them.” She really did love every single flower—as long as it was pretty. So when the florit asked what they should use, my mother repeated “All of them.” The family arrangements were filled with every spring flower imaginable, in every color. I mostly chose to preserve roses, irises, and lilies, as they held the most memories for me. The following week, I took a single yellow pressed rose and cut some decorative silver paper to slide into a gold frame to give my grandfather as a keepsake, a reminder of Maw-Maw and her craft.

Arranging flowers has become bittersweet. Last year, my family had bought the flowers for my brother’s wedding, which was postponed to this July due to the pandemic. Now that she passed, this will be the first wedding my family arranges without Maw-Maw’s input. Without Maw-Maw’s careful eye, my mother and I wonder whether she would approve of our work.More than anyone else, my mother has begun filling Maw-Maw’s shoes. Not only did she make many of the decisions for the funerary arrangements, she also came up with the idea of letting people take home flowers to preserve as memories. She helped the family divide the live plants, given as gifts to the funeral home, and unknown to me, she took it upon herself to make sure Maw-Maw’s gravestone had flowers the day after the funeral. While everyone was at Maw-Maw’s house, talking and eating after the funeral, my mother went up to the supplies in the attic and found a few sets of flowers already grouped together, as if Maw-Maw had them waiting. She woke up early the next morning, after a restless night and set to work, even sending my dad to get some extra styrofoam so she could make arrangements for her grandparents as well, and when I walked into the kitchen when I woke up, there were four perfect masterpieces waiting. My mother, father and I rode back to the gravesite I had first seen with Maw-Maw so many years ago and delivered Maw-Maw’s flowers one last time.