The true everlasting flower

Last Sunday was Mother's Day and it seemed that the desire to share carnations with the world's mothers was overwhelming. First of all, the local big box was handing out the long-stemmed pink flower to any woman who walked through the door. I side-stepped this intrusion on my shopping. I was not so fortunate at church, where I didn't know what to do with said flower while I sang the anthem. Upon leaving, I foisted it off on a friend to give to her grandchild who could then add it (no doubt) to her mother's collections of carnations.

Thinking I was safe, I sailed into Starbucks, only to be presented with another. We were on our way to a musical and then dinner out, so I tossed it in the back seat of the car and didn't give it another thought. Forgot about it actually, until Tuesday morning when I opened the rear door and found my carnation. It had been without water for 36+ hours and looked quite well for the experience. Guiltily, I took it into the house and put it in a bud vase where it now dominates the kitchen counter. It looks forlorn and a bit lonely and I hope that's a touch a brown I'm seeing so I can toss it guilt-free.

Carnations not my favorite flower, you say? Probably not. Their very ubiquity and stubborn refusal to crater when a saner flower would do so, rub me the wrong way.

And then there's the carnation which refused to die.

When I was growing up, and probably until about 15 years ago here, on Mother's Day Sunday everyone wore a flower. If your mother was alive, you wore a red one, if dead, a white one. Absent supplying it yourself, there was always someone at church handing out the appropriate hue. My mother had red roses and made sure we were outfitted correctly. However, my dad's mother had died many years beforehand and Mother had no white ones.

Enter the white carnation. Kept in a plastic see-through box in our refrigerator, this boutonniere lasted from year to year. To year. I don't remember the refrigerator being without it, nor do I know what eventually became of it. But each year, Mother pinned it to Daddy and that was that.

I grow white roses in my garden and red ones. If the tradition were still alive, I'd pin a white one on myself and a red one on my husband. By the end of the service, they would look haggard and tired and be discarded, as they should be, not sagging in my kitchen because I can't throw it away just yet.