Still Lives in Lockdown

2019 was a hectic year for me. That migt be a little unexpected, but it was the first year of my son’s life, I was breastfeeding and learning to deal with a new and changing body, and both my husband and I weren’t employed. We had enough money from an inheritance my mother left after her passing in 2017 to spend a year or so to get to know our son together, but the year passed quickly and soon we were in a rush to find a job (at least my husband was). He started early, applying in the autumn, confident that he would find something suitable. That confidence waned as the months came and went, and we neared the end of our little nest egg.

It wasn’t until February of 2020 that he finally landed a position, but even that required us to move 3 hours away from our established home in the countryside of Aberdeen to a flat in the city of Glasgow. Initially, Jon stayed with friends close to the city and commuted to work from there; we simply lived to far to commute and had yet to save up enough to put down a deposit on a new place. Somehow, by March 3, everything fell into place and we were able to move in and get settled just in time for the national lockdown due to COVID-19. We spent all of a week in our new city, no friends made or family nearby, and honestly, we are only just coming out of it now.

All of this is why I felt deeply unsettled, anxious, and depressed in the spring of 2020, and it wasn’t until a friend began sending me the beautiful still life photos by Jamie Beck that I began to emerge from the fog. Still life art had a kind of resurgence on Instagram during the spring and summer of 2020, and the elaborate and beautiful photos inspired me down to my bones. Unfortunately, I told my friend, I’ve never been a photographer. I don’t have the eye, nothing ever comes out right, I don’t even have a camera. However, she insisted and I relented. It didn’t take long for me to research the “best” starter DSLR and have it delivered almost the same day. Armed with just a kit lens and a whole lot of creative juice, I got started.

I must interrupt to say that photography and photo design and flower arrangement, changed my life. I have been a writer since I could hold a pencil, so I am familiar with the muses and their fickle nature. With photography though, I almost never feel stuck, and when I began arranging and photographing flowers, my world opened up.

This may sound hyperbolic, but please bear with me. I was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, in the suburbs by a single working mother. My connection to the natural world was framed with scorching concrete and asphalt kissed by heat waves. Being a “Tom boy” I never took to flowers, and being a child of city life, I never really felt in tune with nature.

In the late spring, I began to search for flowers in Glasgow: little buds or blooms that I could snip from overgrown gardens or empty lots without too much remorse. From this I learned flower names and meanings, and uses of weeds and stocks and leaves. My world cracked open as I pushed my 1.5 year old son around the city and brought my regular house sciccors to snip away little bits of flora. I also began to see everything differently, my eyes drawn to the green and lush sprouting between buildings or pavement cracks, my heart racing at the site of an errant rose.

Then I would return home, dig out florist tape and those green foam blocks, and I would arrange. My husband would take my son and I would have an hour to myself to cut and style flowers into just the image I wanted. It was soothing, but most of all it was invigorating, and it had nothing to do with being a mother or a spouse or producing breastmilk or entertaining a toddler. For me, that’s the most inspiring part of all this. I was able to find myself again under many layers and in a time of great global trauma. It saved me, and it lit my creative spark in a brand new way. Now, I’m always watching for the bent neck of a tulip, the splash of light through a window, and any flower eager to be cut away from its roots and made immortal.