the cassandra pages

Arrangement

I did buy flowers yesterday.

The flower shop was filled with plants in natural-colored pots, and perhaps "filled" is misleading, because as I walked along the side shelves and the large table in the center of the long narrow shop, I noticed that each dwarf orchid or fern was given its own space, and that there was nothing large or showy in the entire room; it felt, rather, like a gallery of Persian miniatures.

I went to the back, where a single small cooler contained tall galvanized buckets of cut flowers; there was more color behind the glass than in the whole rest of the shop. The florist was a Japanese woman, small and elegant in beige and black; her daughter, I decided from the way they spoke to one another, was speaking in French to a customer on the phone; she had a sophisticated short haircut and wore black with a loose lavender vest.

The florist came over to me and asked what I would like. I don't know yet, I said. Some lilies, perhaps? she suggested. Startled, since lilies are among my favorite flowers, my eyes went to them, on the second tier of shelves, above the roses; there were yellow ones, and orange, pink, and further over to the right, white and some dark shades. How much are they per stem? I asked. Six dollars, she said, and I said fine, I'd like one stem of the white and one of the dark red. She nodded and opened the door and carefully chose and removed two stems, and then asked, would you like them like this, or with some greens? With some greens, I said. She was already bending down looking at the choice of greenery in another section of buckets, and I moved closer, away from the counter, to tell her no asparagus fern, no baby's breath please, but she had already pulled out a single long frond, like the leaf of a sanseviaria, and was holding it away from her body, in back of the lilies which she held tightly together in one hand. She glanced at me. I gave a slight nod and smiled, and instinctively stepped back. She pulled out another broad oval leaf, of darkest green, and two branches with smaller oval leaves that she placed on a low table. Holding the lilies and long leaf in place with one hand, she doubled the dark leaf, curling its point back against the other gathered stems; again she paused to consider her decision. Then she cut two smaller branches from the ones on the table, and held them on the opposite side from the doubled leaf.

I watched, my breath slowing down, understanding now what I was being given. With her other hand she unrolled a length of fine greenish hemp, cut it, and tied the arrangement together, wrapping the twine for a distance of perhaps an inch and a half along the stems. She didn't look at me again for approval, and all of this was done quite slowly and deliberately. When all the stems had been secured, she held the arrangement away from her body again, and then quickly, deftly, tied the top of the long frond into a knot.

She moved to the main counter and placed the arrangement on a piece of delicate grass-green paper, not tissue, but something finer and impervious to water, and then enclosed all of it in transparent cellophane, stapled up the side, and gathered all of this below the blooms with a bow of dark green ribbon affixed with a gold sticker bearing the name of the shop. Then she slowly turned the bouquet to face me, looked up, and met my eyes with a very slight incline of her head. I smiled, nodded, and said thank you very much, it is extremely beautiful. She smiled then, very slightly, and I paid her and walked out into the sunshine.

March Canadiana

1. Lechez les vitrines, "Lick the windows:"  the French phrase for window-shopping. When it's too cold to stick your tongue out and lick anything, snow and mud everywhere, we still stand transfixed in front of window displays of alive green things. The other day in Little Italy, I crossed the street to stare at a florist's window where an array of tall, opaque yellow, hand-blown glass vases held a small forest of orchids: yellow, golden, cream colored with brown and yellow spots. Next to me, a homeless man stood doing the exact same thing, like we were both starving.

I didn't go into the florist the other night; a signboard next to the door advertising tulips for $15 a bunch put me off.  I can't get used to the prices of flowers here. In March, the grocery stores in Vermont used to sell big bunches of tulips for $6. You could get a lovely bouquet for anywhere between $4 and $10. We're closer to distribution here, I'd think, and flowers always tend to be cheaper in all the cities I've visited - I don't get it. It's like I said: robbing the starving woman. 

2. Walking on St. Denis and Mont-Royal on Sunday night, people were screaming everywhere. It took me a minute to realize: sports bars. hockey. olympics.

3. Meanwhile, editorials in major newspapers chide Canadians for their "unbecoming displays of boosterism," this "unCanadian' nationalism!" during the past two weeks. "What's gotten into us?" they ask. I actually consider buying a cool T-shirt at the Bay, with Canada emblazoned across the front of yellow, blue, or red cotton; it's part of the Bay's official Olympic team gear, somehow so much less commercial-seeming here than in the U.S. But I don't because boosterism is frowned on, and I find that so refreshing after a lifetime of not being properly up on American sports.

4. We're mesmerized by a woman from the eastern ocean: "Near my house on the Bay of Fundy, the tides are 45 feet high," she says, "but we have a micro-climate; I grow peaches, and sweet and sour cherries. And we have lemon and orange trees in pots on wheels that we bring out in the summer, they do beautifully. Still, I want to move back to Montreal."

5. Railroad cars clatter by on the Canadian Pacific, bearing beaver logos and stylized sheaves of wheat. "That's our train," we say, when we see it on the overpass in the distance.

6. J.'s bike gets stolen on the first day it's sunny and warm enough to ride it. The heavy U-shaped lock is twisted like someone pried it with a crowbar; seems incredible, but the bike is definitely gone.

7. Kate's Canadian stereotypes make us laugh again.

8. We know the secret: spring is really coming, and it will be so poignant here that you want to hold each day tight in your hand, like a silken peony bud that's too beautiful to open.

9. That won't be for another four weeks or so. Or maybe eight.

10. I mailed my first package to Nunavut yesterday! And it cost the same as any Canadian postage, even though the Arctic is way, way far away. It's still Canada.