I Like Flowers

My mom has always liked flowers. At our first house, we had a yard so massive that it felt like an endless sea of grass to my smaller-than-an-adult body -- and it had a garden. The garden wrapped around two entire sides of the backyard, ending in our play structure and massive, custom-built sandbox. On the west side, rows of plants I nestled toy dinosaurs within tumbled over each other leading to the black chainlink fence separating our backyard from our neighbors' strikingly barren yard. On the north side, towering pine trees climbed to the sky, heaps of daffodils surrounding their bases. A magnolia tree was placed perfectly at the corner of the west and north side of the garden, joining the two sides in a perfect transition. Running along the house were simple flower bushes and a hydrangea my mom dumped aluminum sulfate under every year to turn the flowers blue in vain. On the south side of the house grew lilacs, and a forsythia clambered up the brick chimney. Wrapped around the front of the house was a garden filled with peonies, surrounded by stacked stones. A much more modest garden with roses and other such classic flowers completed the array on the northern side of the front yard, meeting our driveway.

My mom spent ages tending her garden when I was little. I suppose she got it from her father, because when she was growing up, her house had a garden even larger than ours. Almost every flower you could grow in Massachusetts was in that garden at some point (or in the winter, it was in the greenhouse). The hiding places for Easter eggs were truly endless. 

It's still unclear if my family's green thumb has carried over to me yet. I know some basic stuff about caring for plants, but I still can't really tell why a plant is dying yet. I'm well trained in feeding plants every spring, as I was forced to help Miracle-Gro them for years. But most of the time, my mom just tells me what to do and I don't necessarily retain that information. I'm also not the best at paying attention to plants -- I've killed at least one plant in my room because I forget to look up and make sure it gets water in between studying and the rest of my life.

But one thing is certain -- I love plants, specifically flowers. This might seem like an understatement to those who know me well, especially anyone who's been shopping with me. When it comes to flowers, I can't really resist anything. At a guess, I'd say a solid half of my wardrobe is floral print of some sort. I've been told I have an addiction, which I suppose is only fair. My bedspread has various flowers on it, my backpack is flowered, my wallet is floral, my phone cases have consistently been flower patterned, and I'm ten times more likely to buy something if it has flowers on it. There are hundreds of pictures of flowers from our garden in a folder on my laptop. I have at least 30 different items of clothing that have some sort of floral print on them. My go-to anything probably involves flowers. 

I could probably wear two week's worth of different outfits that include floral print if I really wanted to. It wouldn't be weird, because that's just me at this point. I suppose that says something about me. After all, clothes communicate a lot about your personality, your activities, your life to other people. They're one of the few things that communicate a potentially significant aspect of your personality to strangers in public. It's part of the reason I didn't like wearing t-shirts with words on them for years -- I didn't like people immediately knowing what school I go to or where my dad works or what activities I did just because of a t-shirt I was wearing. (That and I also didn't like the idea of attention being on me as people read my shirt. Younger me was pretty shy.)

So I've always stuck to neutrally patterned clothes. But I guess if you want to read too much into my clothes, they still tell you something about me. On the very surface level, there's the basic me-being-obsessed-with-flowers. But dig a little deeper, and I suppose you could make some creepy statements about my personality.

My style is pretty wholesome, and I think anyone who meets me can tell that. Flowers have an innocent feel about them. I wouldn't call them a classic pattern like stripes or polka dots, but typically anything with flowers on it doesn't have a risqué design. The most I've ever found is some low necklines. But in general, flowers have a very calm feel to me. They're baseline nature along with grass and trees.

To an extent, I think I can be a pretty wholesome person too. Simple things bring me joy. I wear a lot of flowers because they're pretty and remind me of an intense childhood love for an oddly specific thing. We all have one of those: space, dinosaurs...for me, it's flowers. They remind me of wandering around hundreds of gardens as a child and growing to love them. They remind me of long spring days spent spreading mulch and watering annuals, they remind me of trips to Prairie Gardens. Flowers have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Maybe if my mom didn't like flowers, I wouldn't care nearly as much about them. But then again, when it comes to happiness, I'm easily pleased. Flowers make me happy. I like to look at them because they're pretty. And that's really all I need out of my clothes.