Floral tributes

Everyone loves flowers brought indoors. Those showy emblems of natural plant beauty add a dimension of grace and charm to your home, no matter how modest it may be. Allergies aside, at any time of year or on any whim we can enjoy the opulence of indoor bouquets that were formerly confined to their local season. This has been an economic boost for some South American countries whose exports to America were sometimes of the mostly illegal and harmful variety. If one assumes that the financial benefits and not the adverse conditions are shared with the workers, it has been a positive revolution in some communities to have an agricultural product that brings employment and improvement. Olé to that!

Still there have always been flowers available out of season, if one had the money to pay for them, but now everyone has the luxury of affordable exoticism flown in for our abundant delectation. Blessings upon us! At our house there are always fresh flowers placed for maximum effect: on the front entry, in the living room and bedroom. I don't ignore bathrooms and guest quarters for special occasions and the kitchen when appropriate. I say appropriate because the element of fragrance is one you simply must not ignore. This is one of those common sense precepts handed down from mother to daughter in many cases but I mention it because there is never a guarantee of maternal training in all matters domestic. You may find that an understatement, more is the pity.

Anyhoo, arrangements of flowers are encouraged whether they be truly and artfully 'arranged' or just dumped into a handy container. Be sure to trim the stems to fit the container height and in order to provide fresh stem area for water uptake. Remove any lower leaves of blooms that are below the water level. If you don't do that your flower water will turn to a wet soup of composting plant bits and shorten the duration of the life of the flowers whose time is already fleeting. Add some of that packaged flower life extender to the water if you wish. It likely contains an anti-bacterial agent and a little plant sugar to prolong the effect, though I have noticed that in practice it seems to curtail the floral fragrance. Try this with freesias and see for yourself.

Back to fragrance. As your mother may have told you, avoid fragrant flowers in the kitchen and forbid them in the dining room. Let's face it, the colors and textures can be quite satisfying on their own. Some flower smells can blend with, and I daresay interfere with, the aromas of appetizing food. I recently attended a particularly wonderful luncheon but the hostess, in her Spring enthusiasm, had prominently placed hyacinths all along the run of the table. This created a battle zone of sensory conflicts in every guest's face. It was difficult to appreciate the tasty and well prepared meal with so much heavy aroma cascading onto the plate. Grape hyacinth would have delivered a better 'Welcome Spring' announcement. Taste and smell are so allied with each other that the complement of one with the other must be subtly managed for a successful table. Manage your aromas for best effect and dedicate your table to the luxuries of color and texture exclusively, but by all means bring flowers indoors to share them.

With hugs, Celeste

Mother's Day

Momma was on my mind recently. I thought about her as I was falling asleep on the sofa one gray afternoon. I let my book down and closed my eyes for a rest and for some reason I recalled her wonderful linen closet which was always well organized and smelled like freshly ironed linens should have, with a hint of spice. I am not sure where the spice came from but it was a vague blend of clove and orange zest much like that of a pomander ball. Perhaps she had a few of them stashed shriveling slowly in the back of a shelf; I don't really know. The scent had nothing to do with floral hints of lilacs or lavender or any of the more conventional laundry aromas that are now so common in a gestural bow to some fanciful traditional that probably never was. I cringe when I see “fresh linen” as an aromatic selection. It is a completely artificial affectation if you ask me and I avoid any product suggesting such an association.

Howsoever that may be, Momma's linen closet did not contain just towels, sheets, pillowcases and bedware. It also was the central station for her sewing kit (with its protruding sock darning egg), her knitting basket, the medicine kit, the shoe polishing kit and the shoelaces. One has to remember that shoelaces were a basic and important element of good grooming in those days and that there could not have been a well-run household without a backup supply. If I imagine myself as a shoelace salesman for a factory in those days, I can feel pretty smug about my prospects. Who doesn't need shoelaces? And with all the new styles and colors of footwear and the different materials for lacing, how can I not feel that I'll be writing orders until the day I die without interruption except for that. From our vantage point we can see that it is the same outlook that the buggy whip people felt at the beginning of the twentieth century. Things were looking pretty bright then because it was a product vital to daily life. For our shoelaces we had to have the right length and color and texture to make a proper showing and, whether they came from Mr. Peach's general store or the mail order catalog or the traveling salesman, we had to have an ample supply because they wore out, they broke or they didn't match the polished finish perfectly. When sneakers and saddle shoes came into popularity that compounded the complexity of choices. As with some of Daddy's neckties, there was a slow accumulation of unwanted and unloved specimens being pushed to the back in a sad little heap. Eventually they were disposed of when they grew to a level of interference with the more desirable types.

The point of this meditation is twofold. First, is the mutability of life which I shall leave to the poets and the other is the power of reminiscence that comes from the most unexpected sources. There was nothing in my book or my day or my immediate surroundings that would suggest an obvious link to Momma's hall closet, least of all to the shoelaces stored there. Still I can relive my sense of wonder, standing before that open door, breathing that aromatic fusion of spice and laundry, deciding which laces would look best with cordovan polish and of putting all my faith in finding the perfect selection among Momma's abundant provisions.

Big Hugs, Celeste

Play ball!

It is alright to be mad at me. But I couldn't abide it if you stayed mad at me. We can agree to disagree, if we must, more is the pity. Remember when I provided my fashion travel guide? Remember my caution about uncalled for baseball hats? Here's why we may have a problem: I think most women look dreadful in baseball hats and ought not wear them at all. As a “look” there is nothing flattering about a baseball hat unless one is trying to effect a look of fearsomeness. There is the “arrested juvenile” look of it that detracts from any seriousness of purpose one may have cultivated as an adult. There is the “imitation of men” aspect which ought to give any thoughtful woman pause before she dons such an ornament so emblematic of “manliness”. You can quibble that this is precisely the role which a feminist ought to play: breaking the tablets and questioning the shibboleths. I would argue that it is a meager attempt at best to erode any of the many crusted gender perceptions. It doesn't work! It looks imitative.

If one wants to appear an icon of gender neutrality, then there are other and more effective ways to accomplish it. It is not a credible strategy to assume the appearance of the other sex in an unattractive way. If this sounds like the old argument about wearing pants, so be it. My purpose is not to stop feminist progress in its tracks, only to make it appear more attractive. A baseball hat is rather a thoughtless fashion choice. True, it meets a variety of practical purposes: sun hat, rain hat, fishing hat and fan ornament. Sadly though, much of the time it is a faded and grungy relic of its original incarnation and it reflects poorly on the wearer's style choices, not to mention team loyalty. Yes, there are ridiculous pristine examples with gold braid and embossed logos but they carry their own commentary on excessive consumption and self-absorption.

It has really become such universal head gear, that it is impossible for most people to separate it from the general fashion currency, where it is an accepted and normal adornment at what I would consider inappropriate occasions. But here I am speaking about the use by women, who I feel can do much better since they are more likely to consider style and appearance before they leave the house. If one takes the time to apply the magic of makeup, then I think it is undercut by topping the effect with a baseball hat, unless one is actually playing baseball or some equally indolent sport, and one cares little about hair-styling.

In the days when hats were sized to the wearer and not mass-produced to fit everyone with an expanding ugly plastic strip, wearing a hat backwards lent an appearance of carelessness. From the front, the hat could have passed for the brimless cap of some strange order of worshipers. With the addition of the plastic strip, the frontal view is utterly ludicrous and one appears disconcertingly casual in the extreme. This is not a look I recommend for any woman who has already crossed into fashion danger territory with an uncalled-for hat! A chapeau must flatter or why bother?

Hugs galore,

Celeste