RoseDay: My Journey With Flowers

Today is Rose Day and I was remembering my journey with flowers. Have you ever gifted anyone a flower? And have you ever received flowers as a gift? It's a great gift to give and to receive. Try it sometime. No better day than today.

 

I remember during my school days, I started speaking to a school friend over the phone quite often. I was a shy kid and she was very talkative. I kept saying hmm to everything she said and she would go on with her stories. The first time we met, I took a yellow rose for her. Yellow signified friendship, signified I liked to talk to her. It was the first rose I gifted to someone. That school friend of mine remains a friend for life and is now married to another school friend of mine. When I visit them, I am so glad that I gave her a yellow, not a red rose.

My history with red roses began with my first love. It was college time. I started speaking with a friend of a friend and unlike my school friend, she didn't talk only about herself. She would make fun of me, make me laugh, and ask me questions that made me think and talk. From a shy introvert, I became a confident talker. Sooner than I could realize, I was smitten. We met, started going out and on our third date, I took a red rose for her. Cheese, now you'd think, but I was 18. That's okay for that age, isn't it? Over the course of the relationship, I gifted her three more roses, all of which she preserved in between her books. We dated for a few years and then it reached an unceremonious end like most college relationships do. Change of space and financial situation post-college affected the dynamics. She was in a well-paying job, I branched out to become a full-time scholar. Our lifestyles changed and we drifted apart.

After our last meeting that defined our end, she couriered all the letters we exchanged along with the well-kept roses to me, since I never received one so there was nothing for me to hold upon. It was the symbolic end of our beautiful togetherness. Ten years later, I still have the big packet containing the parched petals of the roses and the handwritten notes, her handwriting way better than mine. We never met or talked after that. It was difficult in the beginning but I moved on. I met people who taught me love can happen twice, thrice. I never really think about the decade-old roses languishing somewhere in my cupboard apart from these special occasions. They are a good memory to keep. 

As I grew older and sliced away the layers of cheese, I became a lily and sunflower person. Now when I like someone, I gift them lilies for the vase and sunflowers for the pot. One fills the room with fragrance, the other makes sure they set out in the sun and work towards making the flower bloom. Sunflowers take 90 days from planting to full-bloom and that's a good commitment to ask from someone one wants to spend life with.