If I call to invite close relatives to supper, their reply goes like this:
“Oh! How nice…”
A long pause follows.
Then:
“Er… Who’s cooking?”
So — naturally — I reply: “You have nothing to fear. Husband is cooking.”
Joyful sounds erupt from the telephone.
Me, take offense? No way.
I’m the untalented one in a family of creatively gifted domestic divas and I know it.
My mother, sisters, cousins and daughters — all are fabulous cooks and bakers.
All were born knowing how to arrange a room artfully.
Clothes and hair? Fabulously stylish. Floral arrangements? To sigh for.
And then there’s me. I have to work really, really hard at all these things – with surprisingly strange results.
An expert at inferior design, is what I am.
My greatest talent was in designing and planting our gardens. Really nice gardens — if you like the lush, exuberant kind. There, I seem to know instinctively what flowers and colours go together.
But, these days, I mostly pick the flowers, not plant them.
So — naturally — I recently decided to try floral arranging.
You may remember that I once ruined a very simple Christmas arrangement.
But hope springs eternal.
So — naturally — I decided to channel my inner Christiane, and Karen B. – two wonderfully creative, flower-loving women. I love their blogs.
I stuck some flowers in a vase. Peonies and Solomon’s seal.
“Beautiful”, said my sister.
Shocking.
So — naturally — the next arrangement was — hmmm…..
Friends Lydia and her daughter Sarah kindly gave me a book on floral arranging.
The designs seemed so simple that only an idiot could fail to grasp them.
So — naturally — I failed to grasp them.
I’ve been hiding from Lydia and Sarah ever since.
Along comes my daughter, to shore up my confidence.
I’ll cut the flowers, we agree. She’ll take the lead on arranging them in vases.
They were all very pretty.
So — naturally — I went and stuck allium heads into one of them and ruined her creation. (See the sixth photo from the top.)
But all she said was: “Nice, Mom.“
Encouraged, I stuck another allium head into a few flowers in a thin vase.
And all of that explains why this post is full of flowers in vases.
The nice ones are my daughter’s.
In case you were wondering.
**
Dedicated to my creative relatives, and Lydia and Sarah. And to creative divas Christiane and Karen B.
Cynthia Reyes 