When I started making real money as an adult, my closest loved ones began receiving flowers on their birthday. I have a bad habit of living far away from a lot of people that I care about, and this was something that I could do with the aid of the internet. It isn’t cheap, and it is subject to my forgetfulness, but everyone seems to love it. I’m honestly not the best gift giver. So once I landed on something successful, I stayed.

Then one of the recipients of birthday flowers, my grandmother, passed away. She was my last grandparent, one I had become closer to as an adult through letter writing and such, and I miss her quite a bit. She lived to be 95. The February flower budget lost a line item, as that’s when her birthday was.

Like most institutions, my church paused a lot of things during COVID. The flower ministry, where someone sponsors them for the services, lost its utility when the sanctuary spent its Sundays as an empty room. The church started it back up when we ventured from our cloistered quarantines into tentative togetherness. It worked like this: you reserved a Sunday, paid the expense of the flowers, and if you were doing it in honor of something, you wrote a quick note that was published in the Sunday’s order of service.

I spent much of my earlier part of life with a tight grip on all of my money and a firmer one on the desires that I would have to spend it. The best way to be frugal is to want as little as possible. As I got into a spot where extreme restraint was less required to stay in the black, I slowly started realizing how accessible some nice things are, when done sparingly. Fancy chocolates once a month. Original art. Donations to nonprofits working on causes I’m not brave enough to stomach. And hey, I could afford to sponsor the flowers. Nothing makes me feel richer than being able to be generous.

I forgot to do it the first February after she passed.

This year I remembered. Like the lovely lady who organizes the flower ministry, my grandmother was a very active volunteer in church. Congregations run on the love and labor of lots of people – this felt like a good tribute. I told her some colors, wrote the blurb, and waited for the week to come.

The day arrived, and they were stunning. Grandma would have loved them.

What I didn’t realize until I walked up to the pulpit after the service, is that they were also huge. The church, Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, is this huge building with a gorgeous hammer beam ceiling and stained glass, a cavernous testament to the interconnectedness we have with history. And it also takes a gigantic bouquet of flowers to fill any of the space at all. The thing about sponsoring the flowers, is that you also get to keep them. If you don’t want to, the head usher will take them to a hospital. My grandmother was a nurse, and while that felt fitting, something in me said to keep them.

Maybe because, I, too, really like flowers. And they were consoling my grief as much as they were honoring my grandmother.

I brought them home and they took up the entire kitchen. Hardly terrible, but a bit untenable. I went down to my basement where I keep my spare vases – I buy vases from thrift stores so I can give away flowers from my garden in bouquets. I’ve learned it’s smart just to keep them on hand, and often they are less than a dollar each. I started breaking up the giant bouquet into smaller bouquets. Brought one over to the neighbor whose given my family all of her granddaughter’s outgrown clothes. I was holding a bouquet on the porch of the neighbor who let me use her oven a few weeks ago when I heard another neighbor shouting from a few doors down, “Hey, where’s my tulips?!”

I smiled. I like this lady. And happily, I had plenty of flowers. “You want some?”
“Yes I do! Let me grab my vase. It’s in the top shelf, I got to grab my ladder.”
I realized quickly it was a better idea if I climbed the ladder, which is how her sister watched me over Facetime pulling down this stunningly beautiful magenta-pink squarish vase from the ceiling cabinet (Buffalo Old City House dwellers know which cabinet I’m talking about. It’s the kitchen cabinet on top of the usual kitchen cabinets).

Went home, made a bouquet, and walked it back. Her granddaughter was playing outside with a neighbor girl who knows me well. Both girls eyes lit up. I explained to my neighbor the origin story of the flowers: how they were in honor of my grandmother for church. Her eyes got wide and she showed me where she was putting them: on this beautiful alter that was honoring her own passed mother. She was so happy to have them.

I was deeply moved. I also hate crying. I was trying very hard to hide how teary I felt in that moment. We hugged each other and walked out.

I put together three more bouquets: two which were a single rose and greenery in reused wine bottles for the kids’ rooms. And one for me to keep, to remember her by. It was still a large bouquet, but one that fit, one that spent the week adding color and cheer to the background of my zoom calls for work.

It brought me so much more joy than I expected it to. It was this tether to the interconnectedness of everything: me to my family, to my church community, and to my neighbors. What better way to experience beauty than to get to share it as widely as possible?