My Flower Memories

When I was a freshman in high school I saw dried flowers hung on a wall at a friend’s house.  Her mom had dried them and was keeping them around for decoration.  I was captivated.  I wanted to dry my own flowers and keep them for a bit of sunshine on a sad day.

So I started drying all of the flowers I received on my birthday, from various celebrations, from shows at school, on Valentine’s Day…any flowers I received were dried and placed on the bookshelf in my room. 

Eventually they started to pile up, but I enjoyed their preserved presence too much to throw them out.  At the same time some of the memories from certain bouquets were like a thorn in my side.

Remember whom those were from?  Remember what happened after that?  Remember what was said to you?  Remember this, remember that…. Remember? 

It took a strong emotional force to finally make me get rid of flowers after a certain point.  Letting bouquets of flowers sit in my room for months provided beauty, but also hurt at the same time.  In a way they were just piles of break ups, dates gone wrong, and dances that ended in tears. 

Looking back I wonder why in the world did I keep some of them around so long?  

I should have thrown them out the moment it was over.  But I didn’t because I cared too much about when everything was going right, and I remembered too easily all the times that went well.  At one point those flowers were everything, and then just around the corner they weren’t anything but I didn’t know how to get rid of them.

I especially remember throwing out a certain bouquet.  I had told myself many times, get rid of it already, you don’t need those flowers anymore, but I never walked over to pick it up and carry it to the trash can.  I don’t remember exactly what happened that made me march into my room one day and purposefully carry them to the dumpster in the garage, but I did.  And once I threw them out, I felt lighter.

If I remember correctly I ended up throwing out the rest of the bouquets that had been resting on my bookshelf as well.  I wanted a clean slate, I needed to start over and collect new memories, memories that would hopefully be happier and easier to look at. 

However, the cleaning process happened again about a year later and I once more cleared away all the flowers I had collected.  I didn’t want to keep them around anymore.  That time it was a little easier though, because I was getting ready to leave for college and start a completely new life.  I wasn’t going to leave a bunch of dead flowers around that wouldn’t mean anything to my sister. 

Now that I’m here I’ve started drying flowers again and hanging them from my dorm room ceiling by the window.  There’s not really a better place to keep them.

I have a bouquet from Pike Place, a bouquet from when my Dad visited me and took me out to the best dinner of my life (which you can read about in the blog post Eating Happiness) and a bouquet of roses from when my boyfriend and I made our relationship official. 

 I am fond of them, and I am fond of their memories.  And looking back I was fond of all my other flowers at one point too.  Which makes me realize, no matter what flowers I end up throwing out I’m sure I’ll get new ones that mean just as much, maybe even more.

I just hope I won’t be parting with the ones I have anytime soon.