Memories pt 1: The Florist and the Bookseller

I'm beginning a series of brief memoir posts, to share writing I've never posted elsewhere and in the hopes that you'll enjoy getting to know me a bit.

All images below are original, taken by me or my partner @juddylovespizza, on 35mm film with an Olympus Pen-D half-frame camera.

The Florist and the Bookseller

My mother was a florist and my father was a bookseller.

Well, eventually my mother was a bookseller too and my father became an excellent gardener, but when I was small that's how it was. My mother sold flowers and my father sold books.

She did wedding flowers out of our basement, and the women who worked for her were all her best friends. Ladies with kind smiles and funky jewelry, hair pulled back and shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, always laughing. I would sit on the stairs and watch them work, quick fingers twisting heavy green wire around delicate leaves. Everything was sharp and wet and the bright scent of cut stems smelled like home. I loved riding to the flower warehouse with her, always early early in the morning, a big echoing room full of miraculous blooms and mysterious leaves where everyone knew her name and that bright green smell was everywhere.

Vibernum. Hydrangea. Rhodedendron, phalaenopsis, ranunculus. Delphinium, plumeria, nasturtium.

Big, beautiful, strange words to go with big, beautiful strange creations. She would name them at the warehouse, name them growing in front of houses on our walks through the neighborhood, name them while I played in the backyard and while my father cursed and dug in the garden. Every plant was an old friend or an enemy, every bloom had its own personality. There was never a bud she couldn't identify by names both latin and common, and she had an opinion about all of them. Long before I could read or write, my mother and her flowers were like a library. Full of strange sounds and unknown depths, each petal and leaf was a page waiting to be plumbed.

My father’s books, on the other hand, bloomed like a garden. In our house, shelves rose from floor to ceiling full of leathery collectibles from his younger days. I would pull them down and flip through the delicate pages, running my finger along lines of carefully-printed text, sometimes copying out the mysterious glyphs in my infant hand.

In his bookstore, the books were like flowers in carefully-tended beds. The rough-cedar shelves rose like ancient trees and I wound my way between them, playing hide-and-seek with my brother or inventing my own worlds. Each type of paper had its own scent, as delicate as any rose and more mysterious. His beloved employees were the groundskeepers, tidying tables and setting out new arrivals, wrapping gifts in bright paper with fingers as nimble as those of my mother’s florists.

Me and my parents, not long ago

As I grew older and learned to read, the books which had once seemed as singular and sacred as flowers opened to reveal words and meaning beyond my imagination. A young woman from the bookstore came to work for my mother. A man from her flower world went to work for my father. Eventually my mother closed her flower business and started at the bookstore. My father gardened more and brought home bouquets of blooms plucked on his long walks. The library of flowers and the garden of books merged, remaining distinct only in my memory.

We're far from home, but still keeping an eye out for flowers and books when we're lucky enough to wander together.

Thanks for reading! I'm looking forward to writing more about my life here on Steemit, alongside Isle of Man travel content, book reviews, poetry and treasure-hunting miscellany!