Flowers

Recently I found a small collection of precious items I had forgotten.

I was opening a large dictionary with my daughter. In between the pages we opened were two flowers that my son had picked for me when he was less than two years old. These flowers had been pressed between these pages for nearly fifteen years. They weren’t moldy, and they were only a little faded. The pansy was still purple and the California poppy was light orange.

My daughter was mildly shocked to find flowers inside the dictionary and even more shocked when I told her how long they had been there. I told her I thought there might be more flowers tucked inside that book and together we flipped through the pages looking for them. We did find several more and when she asked me what I wanted to do with them, I told her we should just leave them there. That was a good place for them.

It was a bit of a treat rediscovering that little collection of flowers that had been hidden away all those years. I drifted back through time, remembering the little apartment we lived in, the crabby landlord, waiting tables, and all of this felt like a hazy recollection so distant that it didn’t really seem like it was my memory—my past.

But I remembered clearly the day my son brought me those flowers—my son, who is now six feet and two inches tall, toddling over to me, with his silky brown hair and his little pot belly, and a fat fist full of flowers.

As I put the dictionary back on the bookshelf, beside a large round and dimpled rock, I wondered when I might rediscover those little flowers again. For the time being they were just a tiny, hidden collection—no need for display.