About flowers

Send the flowers to my office, by special courier, on a busy Monday afternoon. Make sure you give an incomplete address and scribble my name unintelligibly. I want a mild commotion at the reception desk, lots of necks craning from around cubicles. I will be waiting, ankles crossed, hands poised on the keyboard and will act appropriately surprised and delighted. I will keep your identity a secret until the switchboard operator learns your voice, then I will upgrade you from casual date to semi-permanent beloved.

A first, send me light airy bouquets of pseudo wildflowers with dots of baby-breath and wispy, tender greens that will arrest mid-afternoon bureaucratic meetings long enough for me to speed-dial you on for an impromptu afternoon picnic. Just think of it: the two of us eating vanilla ice cream on a quilt by the artificial blue pond at the center of the business park. We will blow a small snowstorm of private wishes from a dandelion. You will pick a blade of grass from my lips before kissing.

Later you can send me a happy batch of sunflowers but once love strikes, I tell you, only two dozens roses will do. They will have to be velvet-curtain red and elegantly arranged in one of those satisfying vases with the spiraling weeds and the tasteful silk ribbon. This will be no time to be cheap darling. You will want to be back and this modest initial investment will ensure that all your phone calls will get past my assistant and that my calendar will be cleared for seventy-five evenings in a row.

Whenever you pick me up for lunch, I will lock my arm under yours and smile all the way to the small bistro with the checkered tablecloths and the Gerber daisies sticking from the Italian wine bottles.

Be wary of birthdays and Valentines: I have the taste of an eighteenth-century noble woman who demands overflowing bouquets of peonies and orange-colored roses with a reddish fringe, lots of eucalyptus, some fern, a few orchids and purple lilies. I tolerate neither cheap carnations in bud vases nor stiff suburban arrangements of exotica. Obligations bore me stiff; I want passion in petals.

Should you show up on my doorstep the morning of May 1 holding a small pot of Lily of the Valley I swear I will call in sick and give you my entire day. I cannot resist Lilies of the Valley, they go so well with cold beer and Mexican food. Our day will be so memorable that you will show up the next year, and the one after that, pot in hand, until neither one of us remembers how we got started.

Give me flowers for no other reason that it will make us happy. Surprise me with a bouquet of irises on the dining room table, a single aster on the hood of my car, four bunches of gladiola in the bathroom, a handmade bracelet of black-eyed Susans, a jam-jar full of blue bonnets, wildly colored carnations from a curb-side flower stall, or a handful of wildflowers that will only last only as long as your embrace. I will kiss you every time, run my hand in the back of your neck where the hair is cut as short as the grass on a golf course.

When I grow old and can no longer see, choose for me the most fragrant plants, those that smell of lust, life, sun and wind. I will no longer care for subtlety. You will have to hunt for dianthus, gardenia and lilac and fly me to the Mediterranean for a nap in a lavender field.

Before each fight, hand me two thick purple thistles wrapped in newspaper, but once we reconcile I beg you to deliver whatever pours from your heart: tiny violets, renonculi tied with twine, a pansy dried between pages of my dictionary, a supermarket rose-bush, or some wild-ass tropical monster that will scare the wits out of me every time I step into the living-room. I promise to keep every flower in my heart until it withers away.

Should I die first, do as you see fit. I have seen coffins blanketed by rainbows of gladiola and others graced with a single white rose. Either is be fine by me, but please, nothing in lieu of flowers.

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[Marianne Ivany]

If everyone understood the importance of flowers in this world, as you do, there would never be a cross word, an argument or a war