Writing inspired by the following SWC prompts:

Write about wearing flowers in your hair.

Flowers in her Hair

by Greta Lane

I was on the floor in the middle of my kitchen, kneeling in front of a battered plastic storage box, when my daughter ran in from the back yard. Her dirty feet slapped on the tile and a pink cape flapped behind her; as she passed me, I caught her around her waist and tried to kiss her.
“No!” she protested, leaning away from me, full of five-year-old indignation. “No kisses!”

She was my youngest daughter, her soft cheeks still fat as a baby’s. She had the narcissism only youngest children had: the assurance that I would love her no matter how often she rejected me. I pulled my face away from her head, though the urge to smother her with kisses was so strong it made my breath hitch. She was my last baby and sometimes when the dimples flashed in her cheeks, I was so overwhelmed with love that I wanted to imprint myself on her, searing her with hugs and kisses intense enough to brand her thin skin.

I diverted my unwelcome kiss to fussing at her, wiping dirt off her chin and plucking the yard debris out of her hair. I picked out a stick and some grass, but when I tried to pull a wilted dandelion from behind her ear, she squirmed away from me.

“No!” That was her favorite word. “No! That’s my special princess flower.” She patted her hair protectively. “It’s my antenna to radio the other princesses.”

“I see,” I said, dropping the stick and grass onto the floor. It was so dirty that the additions didn’t make a difference. “Are you playing with other princesses?”

My daughter shot me a withering glance. “That’s silly, mommy. There are no other princesses outside right now.”

I turned my attention to the storage box on the floor in front of me. I’d piled half the contents around its dented blue sides, and now the old clothes and books and newspaper clippings spilled over the edge of the worn oriental carpet we foolishly kept under the dining table. The pile scattered on the floor was not out of place in my untidy kitchen. The sink was lined with dirty dishes, waiting for their morning washing up; school papers were piled with bills and library books on the edge of the kitchen table. The sun streaming through the east facing windows highlighted a small puddle of milk, left on the counter from breakfast.

I reached into the plastic box on the floor and pulled out a pair of sleek leather pants that had last fit me fifteen years earlier. When I held them against my waist, they barely covered one thigh, and I dropped them onto the pile with the other memories that no longer fit. I was searching for my husband’s high school yearbook. It was a task he would normally do himself, but he was laid up with a broken ankle, which left me rooting through piles of old papers and hauling storage boxes labeled “Mementos” up from the basement.

The obsession with finding his yearbook was new. His high school reunion was four months away, but since he broke his ankle, he’d bothered me daily to find the yearbook. The world had grown smaller for him, trapped in our living room, endlessly scrolling social media posts. My empathy for his plight did nothing to make his request less annoying.

My husband was asleep in the corner of the room with his casted leg propped up, an old hoodie sweatshirt drawn close on his face. One of our overlarge dogs circled the rug beside him, flopped to the floor and began to lick its privates. My husband snored, his shoulder twitching, and I only hated him a little right then. Far less than I did at night, when he tossed and turned from the ankle pain and kept me awake until I grudgingly offered to get him aspirin; or in the morning, when his groaning walk to the bathroom woke the dogs to barking; or in the afternoons, when his petulant queries about his high school yearbook made me clutch the sink with frustration.

My daughter reached into the plastic box to reverently pull out a faded crown of cloth flowers that had lain underneath the leather pants. It was nestled between my husband’s yearbook and a kimono from the year I lived in Japan. A pink petal floated back down to the bin, landing beside its blue and yellow mates.

The crown was wilted and patchy now, but when I’d bought it a decade and a half earlier, during the Battle of the Flowers festival in San Antonio, it was as vibrant as the night around me. The festival was music and color and confetti from paper-mâché eggs the locals would crack over each other’s heads. The parade and festival were so integral to the city that local kids had the day off school; the celebration so bright it eclipsed the city’s rodeo.

The night I’d gotten that crown was my third date with my husband, during a time in my life that sounded better than it was, a time I’d brag about to my married friends as often as I would cry myself to sleep. That night changed it all: the magic from that night encircled my date and I, painted him with an allure that good men rarely held for me in those days. It carved a path away from my poor choices in men and into something truer.

My daughter planted the crown on her head, where it sagged over her ears until she pushed it up onto her forehead, rakish as a cowhand’s ball cap. She reached back into the box and pulled out the curly edged photo underneath the errant petals.

“Is that daddy?” She touched the tip of her finger to the photo. I was surprised she recognized him; his face was indecently young. The years had been kind to him, strengthening his cheeks with a beard, adding character to his eyes with crow’s feet. The years had been less kind to me. My cheeks and breasts had sagged, leaking collagen and vitality like the ambition and passion I’d lost.

“That’s right,” I nodded and pointed at the flower-topped woman in the photo. “And that’s me.”
My daughter frowned at the picture, then at me, squinting to see if I was joking.

“That’s you?” she asked. “You were pretty, mama.”

“Hmm,” I said, not correcting her. Nowadays, if I curled my hair and hadn’t eaten too many carbs, I was pretty. Back then, I was hot. Perfect skin, tight body; my hair dark and my eyes un-bagged. And, oh, god, the confidence! The kind of confidence that only happens when you know your looks are a gift. Fleeting. A thing to enjoy.

I reached for the flower crown atop my daughter’s head, but she pulled back.

“I want it,” she said. “It’s a flower super-antenna! Now I can call all the princesses at one time!’’

She raced out the door to the back yard, avoiding my weak admonition, “Be careful with that!” A shout from outside floated into the kitchen. One of the older children, maybe, or one of the neighbors. A death knell for the flower crown.

The crown was no longer mine, no longer my link to that night in San Antonio, filled with crimson and gold and fluttery pink; suffused with cinnamon sugar from deep fried churros and music so loud I could barely hear the effortless Spanglish that bounced from vendors to partiers and back again. No longer the time machine to that dazzling night when my husband changed from being a guy I was dating to the man I was going to marry. The night that opened the gate to my future, away from the loneliness and uncertainty that had interspersed and eventually overtaken the adventure of my twenties.

Now the crown was a super radio conductor to all the other princesses, to be worn and spoken through until it became a frisbee for the dogs, to be chased and slobbered over until it became a hazard for my husband to find when he cut the lawn in two months, to be cursed at and extracted from the damaged mower blades and thrown vindictively in the trash.

I stared after her, imagining the downfall of the old flower crown until my thoughts were broken by the other dog, smaller than the one sleeping beside my husband, but still overlarge. It nudged my pockets, where I kept used tissues and hair ties and plastic bags and old dog biscuits. Absently, I fished out a stale biscuit and wondered when I became the kind of person who wore an oversized flannel filled with the detritus of suburban motherhood.

I dropped my eyes to the plastic box. To my husband’s high school yearbook, juxtaposed against my memories of brighter times, times with a tauter chin and darker hair. With a snort, I covered the yearbook with my shiny leather pants. Then I haphazardly threw in the rest of the contents that had been piled around the storage box, the jumble of old scarves and hats and pictures growing until I needed to kneel on the lid to cinch the handles closed.

I hauled the plastic box to the basement, piling it among its mates, each labeled, “Mementos,” “Memories,” “Old Clothing.” I’d re-find my husband’s yearbook another day, sometime when his handsome salt-and-pepper hair wasn’t an affront, when my pockets weren’t filled with broken dog biscuits. Sometime when I didn’t want to run away from the life I’d painstakingly constructed for myself, when the kids and dogs and husbands and dishes and curtains didn’t feel so overwhelmingly like a prison I’d mistakenly built when I was attempting to grow a garden. When I remembered why I no longer wore the leather pants; why I spent a decade chasing myself from one side of the world to the other. On a day when I remembered why I’d had to bury myself in music and crowds and wine to get through that decade.

I’d find my husband’s yearbook on a day I loved him again – probably tomorrow – when I was limp with gratitude for the chance to have the garden of kids and dogs and husbands and sinks of dirty dishes. Definitely tomorrow. Maybe the next day.