Introducing “Flowers F🌸r Linda”

A new blog from me, Caits, about the wisdom of plants, of strangers, and of dead people — and of course, always, always, the wisdom of children.

Magically, almost mystically, I’ve been locked out of my social media accounts for the past few months. What I timed as a little break became a permanent situation thanks to a new phone (lesson learned, transfer the authentication app), and boom: my Instagram is dust. Twitter proclaims, thanks to my last pinned Tweet, that I’ve “gone fishing” into eternity.

While life feels lighter without the lull of endless scrolling, I knew I was itching to share again when I started to collect little New York scenes in my notes app. And so here we are.

A younger iteration of my blogging self once relied on daily subway commutes for a front row seat to New York’s always-unfolding theater. But in a pandemic world, I have come to loathe the train’s noise and confinement. Take me to the river! Now, I have another vehicle to story with and from. Thank you Hudson River Greenway, thank you new e-bike. Combined you are the perfect inspiration-engine. And thus, here is my week in biking and noticing.

I want to start by telling you that I love hibiscus, whose big pink faces pop up on the bike path once you hit that sweet spot stretch, just around the unmistakable stench of mulch and the wind kick of the helicopter launch in lower Manhattan. That I once, for a long time but now a long time ago, rejected the color pink as a forced symbol of girlhood. This was unfortunate, if just for me, because pink is truly such a big fuck you! of joy and pleasure: tropical, bold, fun, funny, even! Anti-spasmodic and anti-diarrheal pink: a healer who doesn’t take themselves too seriously.

Thanks to my bike, this past week I’ve allowed myself to wonder for a whole half hour about the backstory of the speed-walking granny bodybuilder, and the large white parrot clawing the shoulder of a wild-haired man (seen at two different times of day, but in my head they are lovers and he worships her rock hard thighs.)

I want to tell someone—and it might as well be you!—about the small airplane tailing a surreal sign through a big blue sky settled atop the Hudson. It was a promising sight (an artist’s project?) until I, well, actually saw it: a graphic photo of a fetus under the words Black Unborn Lives Matter stamped in that signature block font. Was I hallucinating? But sure enough, the park gardener and the roller blading couple’s faces were cocked skyward, too, a quizzical expression betraying their otherwise New York-stoic faces.

I don’t want to tell you about the woman I saw at 125th, and the vulnerable beauty of her thick and bountiful skin on display, fully nude with the curves of a goddess, which for a split second I admired until the scene came into full view. Then: the nervous cop on his radio, calling back over his shoulder to check in with the woman (you okay?), who nodded yes, calmly, head held high though unable to cover herself, hands pinned behind her back, and the bystanders who chose to look, and I mean they looked without flinching, and it was not with the energy of protection or care, I mean they gawked at the spectacle as if a television show, they looked without shame. I quickly pulled my own eyes back on the path, even though, for so many reasons, and none of them good I’m afraid, I wanted to look, too.

I didn’t want to want to look, and I didn’t want to tell you about my looking (for however brief, I did look), but I am telling you all of this because in that exact spot the next day, a teenage girl taught her best friend dance moves, and I heard just a snippet whipping from her smile as I rode by—And then you pyramid!—her hands in the shape of a triangle framing the dusky sky.

The stage is always changing, in this city, in our lives, and the scenes need not be grand to be beautiful — or painful, as the case may be. The scenes, internal and external, always change, and if you stop to think about it, so many thank gods for that, really.

Of course, it is all in the noticing, which is different than looking. It requires a more active, searching attention. A generosity, I would even call it.

I’ll tell you who is an expert at noticing: Ross Gay. I picked up The Book of Delights back when it first came out. His records of wonder were so reminiscent in spirit of my own past blogs (though better written, I can admit that openly) that I laughed aloud! Gay lives up to his name, and plus, like me, he uses exclamation points in a manner that might be considered “too much” for boring people. Seeking what is most alive in my own nearby surroundings, I dove into the book again this past week and it is helping me (for the second time) to see with fresh eyes.

To commemorate these new eyes, I’ve started a new practice: carrying plastic googly eyes in my pockets to make friends everywhere.

But, now that I think about it, these new eyes are old-new eyes, by which I mean, the new eyes are not new news. A spiritual channeler already told me last year that I see “with the eyes of a new one” (believe in it or not, the woman was a goddamn poem), and she expounded in the gloriously broken speech of the spirits that very specifically, I see “with the eyes of a crustacean.”

At the time, I didn’t know what to do with that information. Huh, what? I loved the idea of compound vision, but it didn’t resonate. Now I know. These new eyes shift the quality of my world when I remember that they are within my possession — and even closer than a hand reaching into a pocket. They live on my face!

Proof of the expansion noticing brings: my week (yes, we’re still on my week of cycling) of increased luck. For example, the bike shop dude (Pedro) who fixed up my wheels sneakily refused to put the full tip on my card (maybe or maybe not inflated, I was influenced by my husband the over-tipper), quickly ringing me up at $10 less than I’d asked for — “it’s too much!,” he protested, slipping the bill from the register.

And the next day, stopping mid-ride down at the Hudson River piers, the lovely barista (Nyesha) gifted me a sparkling soda ON THE HOUSE, framed in the grip of her bright yellow nails—and oh, those five tiny, glorious suns!

You might be extra jealous that I rode my bike within an inch of Patti Smith, who was ambling through the West Village with her long nest of gray hair, cradling a bouquet of flowers like a baby (news to which my dad texted me, imagining a near-crash, “There is a certain distinction in having Patti Smith sue your ass.” Ha!)

A friend asked me recently: how do you attract all these little moments of joy?

I said: I notice them. I bet you’ll have baskets of them, if you start to notice, too!

(Noticing seems to attract more, which I can’t explain, except to say they must have always been there all along.)

How can I access them, she asked?

Hmm, I thought.

I shifted the quality of my inner life, I said.

How did you shift the quality of your inner life, she asked?

I said: my mom died.

Let me open up the narrative.

It’s been two years to the day since my mother passed away after battling lung cancer for 15 months, and with her human form, she took a piece of the veil separating the other world from the earthly one, opening a little portal in me, carved by the rivers of grief.

My mother was a social worker, but she was also a master gardener (and a chronic under-tipper, good lord.) It was her art, she said, and it was true. I loved my mother most in muddy-kneed jeans. Little flower arrangements peppered the house and she always made sure to point them out, which annoyed me at the time but I miss now, terribly. When her and my husband struggled to find relational footing, their commonality took root in their mutual love for plants. Now our home is also home to over one hundred plants that get (kitchen sink) bathed, (sun) fed and sung to (off-key but heartfelt) each week.

But not by me, not yet. I live among these sentient beings, but we lack intimacy. This is also changing. I am learning how to shift the quality of my outer world, too. And with that, on the second anniversary of my momma’s transition, I informally name this blog experiment: Flowers F🌸r Linda — emoji required.

What can you expect? No promises, but I imagine this space will be where I will catalog (through vignettes, through formal posts) my growth with plants alongside my growth as a human, set against the story-rich backdrop of New York City. The beauty of a blog is that it works on whim. Time will tell.

Ultimately, I think my little Internet garden will be about finding joy in the everyday. And also grief. Of course, these feelings are cousins — maybe even siblings—by which I think I mean, they both help me understand, unlike any other feeling, that I am miraculously alive.

Said another way: Did you know that there would be no humans without trees?

This is what my five year old friend posed to me in the backseat of her parent’s car last weekend.

Why is that, I asked—fully aware, mind you, that just moments ago I had crashed her tree-shearing party, interrupting her mid-grab delight. (No, no, the tree is our friend!) It was a rather simple solution to avoid a tantrum in response: two removable googly eyes stuck, momentarily, onto two intact leaves gave the tree a visible personality to lean into. (Sometimes humans needs a mirror.)

Don’t you know it worked! And never once did she suspect those very googly eyes had come from her own collection, which, upon discovering I’d left my own stash at home, had asked her mother for through the bathroom door. I knew I was in luck when momma-laughter rang out.

Well, my young friend said to me, holding the key to life while sitting regal in her car seat on the heels of this intervention and now, suddenly, very reverent of trees, and quite serious in demeanor.

We need trees to breathe.