ISLAND FLORIST: (To Someone Giraudel And, A Community’s Flora Adventure)

She … searched throughout her mountain community, throughout its floral diversity. Her collection method like tangerine’s sweet/sour on my buds, is lodged in my memory, years later and thousands of miles away, and speeds, gives up its ambient wholeness to writing.

I see her now cutting to create a birthday wish, a sympathy note, an I-love-you remembrance, a make-up longing, a ceremonial statement during marriage, events of state and reward. It dawned on me that she collected flowers to create another form that spoke to a giver and receiver, to groups and communities living and dead.

She collected, arranging them in a statement on proportion, light, attraction, a hidden tenderness, a suggestivity of sorts. She celebrated the air, its clouds and rain, morning’s wet, its tears of dewy joy on arriving in shapes arranged. By now her sharp nostrils know dawn’s aroma, sensing its cool pull of pollen as she collects.

But I’ve thought often about how the florist feels when bouquets die, when wreaths are laid, rotting, melting leaving no trace such as bone of fingers that once held knives to clip them. I’ve thought about work designed for the grave that is not found, no traces of it when the archaeologist digs. It must be fragrances.

Anthuriums, she says, give aroma, color to mourning’s traditional black, white, purple; to mourners who hold on to anything after departure of loved ones, sense of something, maybe hope. Could be their brightness, she adds, or just opposites to the ugly that many think death to be. She noticed that unlike or like their effects on graves and gravesides, her designs do well classing the air at official events when politicians pontificate about implementation, grant-money, health, housing — only the chair-person recognizes those so-called decorations, gathered from a mountain side, cut at altitudes over the city, town, village.

An Unassuming Love …

I’ve thought about her bubbling emotions as she arranged for a baby’s shower, a pregnant Mother’s birthday or delivery celebration. When she cuts for a Mother’s Day, and she herself is not a Mother, where does she find the eye and sensibility to form Mother’s love into shape?

Flowers talk, and they speak to florist also. It may amaze you, but florists love receiving flowers too from a boo, who wants to woo. They too have hearts with stratified emotions — profound moments when touch brings tears, firms body texture and sparkles starry eyes. They too will tell you that fashioning a bouquet for Mother is not easy.

I’ve thought about her talking to those budding roses, those holding miracles igniting their opening, their unfolding magic petals whose floral fragrance intrudes into her consciousness. I’ve thought about how she hinted at them to wait and how they convey their obedience to time and the moon, noon’s sun, rain, wind, kindness. I’ve thought about how she remembers exactly where she sited them blooming and silent agreements they seal, she and flower.

Black Memory …

I’ve seen her anthurium choices, so glazed-pink like the inner parts of a conch eager to scream the ocean’s paleontology out.

But of all remembrances, it is that which anthuriums convey to those departing this phase of life, who need a dressing, a decoration, a contrived and supporting brilliance to compliment a life lived, be it high or lowly, be it rich or poor, Black or White, from a first or third world mindscape, landscape, buried or cremated, fat or slim, tall or short, weak or strong.

In collecting to celebrate, one learns, she says, to respect a range of human emotions and what one chooses to display says much about one’s socialization and consciousness.

Yes, I choose to speak about my pleasure island along the sides of whose mountains she gathers. I select it for thinking about, though I’m away from it and her. It serves as base from which transcendence begins.

Its images are lodged in my memory and they will not leave until I have excavated them, cleaned them, classified them and even like her, date them.

A Traveloguer …

… I permitted intuition, passing now by way of an island florist, her methods of collection, her care, her love for beauty and working in silence — a sort of archaeological attitude. She played through the fields, along the mountain-sides and at the entrances to hot-houses. She allowed herself to flow, sensing where the next rose might be budding and finding it with smiles.

Each petal, like each letter, paper on which a note is kept, each inscription whether cryptic or legible was crucial to the putting together of the beauty act. She dreamed in color, visualizing purple, blue, yellow even violet spathes to the point where their colors oozed out tenderly from the top of her head as if to travel, to travel to another spathe-laden planet habitat ….

In her interface with those sweet fragrances which did not speak in the language of words and sound, she came to know another  communication leaving its perfumed dust on her fingers — soon gone, washed away. In flowers lay play of life and death, just as in life.

After tending them, planting their seed, she came to know the lily which did not labor or spin. She collected the lucky ones.

She designed somewhere — she had a context. That context is my island of attractions and its cool rivers flow.

• Excerpt from Steinberg Henry’s “An Unassuming Love: Black Memory, A Traveloguer & Cricket” (Chapter 4, 2011) amazon.com, Choices Book Store, Dominica —.