Snippets Of Daily Life (part 6)

"Now I'm lost in another language
Some words I know but I"m mostly confused
You said that love is another language
That I want to learn with you"
 - I Want To Feel Free, by Brett Dennen 



  I sat in the back of a taxi cab with a huge armful of flowers beside me on the seat.
  "Do you love flowers?" the driver asked.
  "Yes, they're for a party," I said, smiling into the rearview mirror as his eyes glanced my way.
  There were sunflowers and Gerber daisies. There were roses in three colors (orange, creme, and yellow tinged with pink- a sunset). There was a spray of babies breath, something with green and yellow tufts, and something else (snap dragons, maybe) in both purple and white. About half a mile from my house is a market where vendors sell fruits and vegetables, fresh meats and flowers. I think I made one sellers day, picking out bouquet after bouquet. Yet it was a fraction of what I would have spent in the States. $2.50 for six sunflowers? Yes. $3 for a dozen roses? Gladly. At home, I spent close to two hours cutting the stems, removing the thorns, and creating the best arrangements my un-professional eye could make. It was for my friend's fortieth birthday party, and these were the decorations. Flowers everywhere. I used up every vase in the house plus a few borrowed ones. When it wasn't enough I took a couple of glasses and cut the stems shorter. Then, I took three glass ice cream dishes, fluted and small, and placed in one a single sunflower. In the others, a pink Gerber daisy and an orange one. I set them beside the larger, more regal arrangements, secretly loving the single flowers in their non-vases best of all.



  Once, a boyfriend ran his thumb along the small, faded scar between my lips and my nose and asked, "What is this from?"
  "I don't know," I answered, truthfully. I've since wracked my brain to recall some facial-scar-producing incident, to no avail.
  I thought it the other night when studying my face in the mirror. Often I notice moles and pockmarks and such on other people's faces, and I wonder if they even notice them much at all. I stare into the mirror, considering the sun marks on my face and the shape of my eyebrows (which I'm continuously questioning ever since over-plucking the thick growth as a teenager in the pencil-thin era of the 90's). I wonder: are there are things - features - which stare back at people glaringly yet which I myself take little to no notice?



  Donuts and fidget spinners. For a time, those were the hot items carried by many, many a street vendor. Large, clear plastic containers of home-made donuts suddenly popped up, carried onto buses and displayed on sidewalks, the sellers calling out their sugary goodness. Or, for only slightly more, one could splurge on a shiny fidget spinner, all the colors and shapes shown on moveable cardboard displays. I saw plenty of evidence of this indulgence (teens on buses, highly distracting kids in church, adults acting as though the object flitting repeatedly between their fingers made them cool). Myself, I'm still perfectly content to twist my rings around my fingers absently, or twirl a pencil.
  I've seen both those objects less and less. Donuts are perhaps still a little more common. Yet if they will rank among the enduring appeal of an item such as, say, sweaters for dogs, which are sold in a startling variety of fleeces, prints, and sizes, remains to be seen.