Bunches of tulips were $2.99 at my grocery store the other day and so, even though I was waiting on a cheque for some work and really shouldn’t have been splurging on any extras until it had actually arrived, I chose some pink ones. “You know,” I said to myself on the way home, “that this is the problem. That you are always going to spend the three dollars on the grocery store flowers or the nine dollars on the cheap bottle of wine when you’re having an off day. This is why you will never have what you really want in this life.” Then I tried to remember what Shawna Lemay had said about grocery store flowers in her new book, The Flower Can Always Be Changing. It was this:
I want to say that what makes me beautiful is I know how to endure the deep winter and how when the snow falls it changes my soul. I want to say winter strengthens me but I know grocery store flowers are the only reason that I make it through.
I live in a climate where it is simply unconscionable (though I don’t let that stop me) to complain about winter weather. Our grass is greenest in January, the blossoms begin in February. And so on. But feelings of well-being have seasons too and it’s been a bit wintery in my head lately. And so, after relocating the quote I continued on and reread the rest of the book.
The Flower Can Always Be Changing (Palimpsest Press, 2018) is a collection of essays about writing, about the process of reading and writing, about day jobs, dreams, jealousies, satisfactions, that although it adds up to something greater than the sum of the parts manages to do so without losing that sense of part-ness. Life is a series of good intentions and daily tasks and internet rabbit holes, dog walks and fantasies of winning the lottery. Lemay embraces the flaws and disappointments while conveying a lot of confidence in her own practice, as a poet, blogger, and photographer. She goes to the art gallery and also to Costco.
It is important, I think, if you have aspirations of writing or making art or whatever to be careful the people you choose as your models for how the work gets done. I can be impressed by someone like Ottessa Moshfegh, whose profile in The New Yorker last year painted a picture (however accurate) of a steely, isolated writing machine. I like her writing and on a day when I’m feeling disenchanted with how I’ve constructed my life I might be tempted to take pointers from her. But I’m probably better served by someone who shares my love of the internet and the little interruptions and even thinks they have a place. The Lemay model, of perseverance while getting the other business of life done, is more to my taste, is what I’m saying. And actually she is one of my little interruptions. I like her photos on Instagram and she likes mine. When she posts something new on her (excellent) blog, Transactions With Beauty, I nearly always click along and read.
She has things to say about this stopping and starting and sidetracking. Later in the grocery store flower essay, “Transcendence,” she writes of picking back up:
My intent, though, in writing about flowers is less about transcendence than it is to simply stay with them. And to come back to them, even when I’ve had to leave off.
Also about having faith. There are several entries on this topic but my favourite features her dog:
The black Labrador situates himself on the rug at 1:30 pm one winter afternoon. He arrives a few minutes before the low sun swings past the tall house behind ours, right before the golden stuff swaggers through the Venetian blinds and pours onto the rug where he just so happens to be.
I read the book the first time late last summer, on the same day I was attempting a quick redesign of the redesign of my website. The first attempt had been a long overdue update but I had been charmed by a zippy, slide-y template that took me nearly a week of YouTube tutorials to customize and that I promptly began to hate the second I let it go live. The redo took considerably less time but I got stumped for a long while choosing the right colour for the little squiggle I had decided to use as a header image. Where I am going with this is that in being encompassing and forgiving Lemay’s book imparted lessons, to me anyway, that had relevance not only for the writerly part of my life but also for small things like choosing a suitable bowl to put compost in and, in the end, not deciding on one colour for a header image. “The squiggle,” I whispered to myself that day, “can always be changing.” Today it is pink.
