Buy The Flowers

It’s not quite throwing money away.

While puttering around my house this weekend getting ready for a dinner party that I was reluctantly throwing, it occurred to me that I should buy flowers. There were flowers in the vases scattered around my apartment that were leftovers from a half-hearted attempt at decorating for Thanksgiving, branches of magnolia leaves and mums snipped from the pot on my roof withering and dry. I kept them around for longer than I should have, but I thew them away, washed the vases and headed into the bowels of Whole Foods where I stood in front of the buckets of value bunches — $5 each! — and selected an armful of flowers and greenery and filler. I came home, threw them all in the kitchen and spent an hour or so stuffing them in vases in silence.

After being tasked with arranging the flowers for a friend’s wedding, spending an entire day in a garden shed stuffing dahlias into Mason jars, I came home and realized that maybe I could improve my living situation by throwing some flowers in a jar and calling it a day. The vase on the TV stand hides the antenna; the “arrangement” above on the bookshelf distracts from the holes in the wall that I need to spackle. Plunking a giant vase in the middle of my dining table hopefully draws the eye away from the peeling paint on the walls and the pile of shoes in the far corner. I have fully transitioned to the state of adulthood where I care very deeply about my home and the way it looks; buying new furniture is an expensive necessity, but flowers are a relatively inexpensive frivolity that are worth it.

Spending money on flowers feels wasteful because flowers die. I considered briefly cultivating many plants instead, but after laying waste to a pothos, multiple succulents and a cactus in a very short amount of time, I realized that that might not be a tenable solution. A cut flower is not dead, but its lifespan is short. I feel less guilty spending $20 on a bunch of tiny roses and some eucalyptus leaves only to literally throw those things away a week or so later because part of the allure of lowers in the first place is the quiet time I spend standing in front of a vase arranging them.

I have no idea what I’m doing with flowers and I lack any discernible sense of composition or design. I just put some things in a vase, fluff them a little and hope for the best.

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