Diary of an Expat Bride] Flowers and thoughts

(Photo: Hüseyin Sarı, Today's Zaman)

28 February 2014 /ELLE LOFTIS, İSTANBUL

One of my part-time jobs as a university student in the US was at a local flower shop. I worked primarily weekends, the busiest time for a florist. Designing corsages for school dances, bouquets for weddings, arrangements for caskets.

Everything was celebrated with fresh blossoms, not just holidays like Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, which were both blessings and curses, especially when they fell on a weekend. From Friday through Sunday evenings I could be found at my post, arranging bouquets or processing orders. It was in general a happy job. It was the workplace where I learned the most about humanity, at the tender age of 19. So much of those lessons I learned many years ago are still very relevant today, even in my adopted country of Turkey.
I was a shy girl, and did not have a boyfriend then. I tried to arrange bouquets and arrangements for people buying for their significant others based on ideas I hoped to someday receive. The floral language intrigued me. Certain colors and blossoms denoting jealousy, admiration, forgiveness, deep passion. The flowers were not inhibited, as I was. When I talked with customers about the blooms, my excitement overcame my shyness. For that I am grateful. Being shy and quiet also helped me learn to observe and recognize certain different behaviors. This helped me later on in life when I would move to a country where, even though I wanted to speak, I did not know the language. I learned to read body language and other signals outside of what was said. Fridays, our shop was usually full of men in a hurry. They were mainly there to buy apology gifts, as I liked to call them. In general, not interested in saying anything special with their bouquets. They would enter the store in a hurry, without even looking around. "Give me something for around $100," they would say. "A special occasion?" I would ask. They would wave me off. "Just something nice for the wife." The wife. Even now, almost 20 years later, this phrase uttered countless times was enough to scare me forever from any marriage where I would be referred to in such a way. I would quickly pull out vases of roses or lilies and send them on their way. Were they getting them for their wives to apologize for overworking all week? A token gesture to buy forgiveness for the following week? I never knew. But the aura that these Friday night customers gave off was in general not good.
Saturdays were usually exciting, and we opened extra-early to make sure the wedding flowers were made as close to the afternoon nuptial times as possible, so they would look their freshest. Happy flowers in all colors of the rainbow. High school kids coming in shyly to pick up corsages and boutonnieres for formal dances. Our shop was staffed with lots of people for Saturday, and it was usually loads of fun, kind of like a party. How could it not be, when we were surrounded by flowers, greenery and happy celebrations all day? Despite this, Sundays were usually my favorite day. I would open the shop at 6 a.m., and would man the shop alone until well after noon, when most churches let out. The shop was peaceful, and this was the time when a lot of truck deliveries would come. No customers usually came until afternoon, so I would busy myself tidying up and cutting and processing deliveries. The time of my week most filled with peace and creativity. If someone came, it was usually in regards to a funeral.

The cruelty of planning for a funeral

These were the hardest orders. To this day I do not understand all of the elaborate and expensive plans that need to be made for American funerals. People are so traumatized and upset by the death, it just seems cruel to force them to plan things for the funeral. Yet there they would be, and for some reason usually early on a Sunday morning. Drawn, exhausted and many times angry. I would sit them down and just let them talk. Tell them what I could do. Ask what colors were the deceased's favorites. What their budget was. And try and make them as much at ease as possible. A lot of my co-workers couldn't handle the rawness of dealing with grief-stricken people. I had a knack for it, and liked to think I offered some small comfort. A lot of these arrangements I arranged myself, and even took them to the funeral homes to arrange on the caskets. The worst one I had to do was for a small child. I barely kept it together.
Sunday morning at precisely 9 a.m. the bell on the door would ring, and I knew it would be my favorite customer. An elderly Scottish gentleman, he would come to the shop every Sunday morning after attending an early church service. His wife was not in good health and was unable to leave the house much. He would come into our shop and spend forever picking up each cut flower to smell and look at it. He liked to make his own unique bouquet every week. Sometimes they looked great, other times I had to bite my tongue as he made some bad choices. I learned early on that he did not like to be helped. He preferred to browse on his own and tell me various stories of his life in Scotland before he moved to the US with his wife. About his garden there, and how he would pick flowers for her every Sunday morning. How she used to help him. He had continued the tradition here in the US, buying the flowers himself as our Ohio winters were not very conducive to gardening year-round. He was interested in what flowers meant. The colors, the blooms, he liked that they could tell a story. The thought he put into each bouquet was touching, even the arrangements he made where the colors clashed. He was vastly different than my Friday clientele. His bouquets usually didn't cost more than $20. But it was the thought that counted. This was the type of thoughtfulness that I craved in a future soul mate.
Weeks passed, and I took for granted that this man would come every Sunday. Until one week he did not come. One week turned into two, then three. He stopped coming, and I was very sad. He was elderly; had he died? I realized I didn't even know his name. Was his wife still alive? I had no way to find out. I transferred universities and moved away shortly after that, to another city and different part-time jobs. But the lessons I learned about humanity from that shop remain with me today. Over time I learned that the best bouquets of humanity are those that are composed of an equal amount of passion, love, jealousy and forgiveness. That our bouquets of life come in many different colors and sizes every year. That the men who buy bouquets in a distracted hurry one year can spend hours browsing for the three perfect flowers the following year. As blossoms change depending on the season and place, so do we.

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*Elle Loftis is an American expat, writer and mother living in İzmit. Contact her at e.loftis@todayszaman.com for questions or comments