Unicorn Zinnias and Lemonade Cosmos
Last fall I proclaimed to myself that I wanted to be a flower farmer. I bought books, spent a small fortune on seeds and tulip bulbs, and rallied my uncle to plow a half-acre near to my house with his smallest tractor.
This was the first time I poured myself and my money into a hobby. I sat on the floor of my living room for days at a time highlighting printouts from the internet and mapping out my flower field. When my seeds arrived in the mailbox I opened each delicate paper envelope to peak at the shape and color of nearly 80 different varieties.
My interest in all things cut flowers had reached a monumental peak and then when it was time to nestle the 5,000 seeds I had so feverishly ordered into small soil-filled trays my interest plummeted. The idea of standing in my greenhouse for hours picking up seeds that resembled sand with a wet toothpick closed in on me with hot humidity.
Days of putting off the thing I planned on the floor of my living turned into weeks and then a couple of months and then I lost my window to start the finicky seeds altogether. When the steady warmth of spring arrived I sowed what seeds I could directly into the ground and planted a variety of tubers and then I felt defeated and sad and I missed how it all started.
My decision to become a flower farmer wasn't a completely random one. It was because flowers make me joyful. Natural pinks and oranges make me smile and green rigid stems remind me of being alive.
The spring I came home from India I created a flower garden. I planted one bed full of lemonade-colored cosmos whose flowers were the shape of cupcake wrappers, big branching sunflowers, and a unicorn variety of zinnia that was a mix of one dozen bright colors.
In the wake of my sadness of what I thought was a chance at a bigger life failed, these small flowers were what drug me out of my house and away from creating applications to jobs I didn't want. They pulled me out of the hole of despair I had created for myself because in the heat of a Missouri summer tiny green stems cannot survive one day without water.
When the flowers came on, I cut, arranged, and delivered them to friends and family I was ashamed to face, some of them being the same folks who had ensured me that my expedition to India would leave me jobless and broke. I showed up on countless doorsteps offering the fluffiest cosmos I could find in my garden with a reaffirming, “Yeah, I guess adulthood isn’t supposed to be fun.”
After a multitude of “ you were right” statements left my mouth, I went home, removed dead buds from bushy plants, and wondered how everybody but me had a good grasp on what was possible in this life. With each weed pulled I willed myself to want the same life that my office going or stay-at-home mom friends wanted.
But, it didn’t work. I wish I loved what’s usual but I don’t. My zinnias are my favorite at the end of the season when their solid colors transform to dappled washed-out shades and I refuse to prune back the giant wisteria bush that has broken the trellis leading into my garden.
This year my flower deliveries are going to my mother, an elderly woman down the street, and a service in town that delivers meals to homebound people. The half-acre my uncle plowed under has been reclaimed by bushing invasive plants that have created an unruly hedge. Sometimes I think about the small fortune of bulbs, tubers, and rhizomes that lay beneath that hedge in weedy roots but then I think of the unicorn-colored zinnias and sunflowers I have managed to keep weeded and watered.
I devilishly miss the lemonade-colored cosmos from last year but when I look at the bits of my garden that aren’t consumed with weeds I smile because I know no flower delivery this year was made with admissions of “you were right. It was silly to think I could have or be the thing I wanted.”
Instead of burying myself in the flower farmer books that line a sagging shelf in my living room I write stories, create little paintings of cats, and let myself think about India and all of the things I know I deserve to do and will do with my time living.
Not one moment has been spent convincing myself to want what's usual or easy as I bend over my rows of unicorn zinnias and no proclamations of deafest or lost hope have been made over cut stems this summer.