I should preface this by saying I love Marlene, and I love that she texted me from the floral cooler at Aldi yesterday with a picture of her own hand, gloved, holding a bouquet of red roses at arm’s length like it was a crime-scene exhibit. She had driven there specifically to do this. She wanted me to see the gloves.
The caption said, “Bogotá. Sprayed twice. Once before the plane and once on it.” I don’t know how she knows when the second spray happens but Marlene is rarely wrong about timing.
For people who don’t know: almost every grocery store rose in America in February was on a refrigerated cargo flight out of Bogotá or Quito approximately forty-eight hours ago. They are grown in greenhouses the size of small airports, picked by women in respirators, and treated with a rotating cocktail of fungicides because a rose that browns in transit is a rose nobody buys. I learned this last Valentine’s from a podcast called “Cut Flowers and the Quiet Damage,” and I have not been able to un-learn it, which is the whole problem with knowing things.
Marlene’s sister-in-law Renata used to work the front counter at a flower shop in Charlotte and she told Marlene that within about six months her hands looked, and I quote, “like she had been doing dishes since the Carter administration.” Renata is in her thirties. She switched to dog grooming and her hands healed up in a season. I am not saying florist hands are the canary in the coal mine of romance but I am also not, not saying that.
The Facebook group I’m in — “Imported Blooms: What’s Actually On Them” — has been posting all week about the pre-Valentine’s surge, and someone shared a leaked spec sheet from a Colombian grower that lists nineteen separate applications across the growth cycle. Nineteen. My tomatoes get water and a kind word and they barely make it to August. These roses are receiving more chemical attention than I received during my entire pregnancy with Cleo and they are going to sit on someone’s nightstand next to a glass of water and a toddler.
My husband, bless him, asked me what I wanted for Valentine’s and I told him absolutely nothing wrapped in cellophane that traveled in a plane’s belly. He took this to mean “chocolate,” which is a separate fight involving the word “chocolatey” that I am saving for another column. What I actually want is for him to walk down to the back fence and cut me some of the witch hazel that’s blooming yellow right now in defiance of the season. Witch hazel is free, it grew here, and the only thing on it is a little frost.
I have started doing foraged arrangements for friends in lieu of grocery bouquets and people respond to them in the most beautiful way, which is mild confusion followed by genuine smelling. Last year I gave Marlene a jar of dried yarrow and pine and she cried, partially from the gesture and partially, she admitted, from relief at not having to dispose of pesticide water down a drain that empties into our shared watershed.
Cleo, who is six and has the moral clarity of someone who has not yet had to compromise on anything, came home from kindergarten on Tuesday with a flyer about the class Valentine exchange. The flyer said “store-bought treats only, no homemade.” I am going to send her with a small bag of dried rose hips from our hedgerow and a note that says “these are technically roses,” and we will see what the room mom does with that information.
Marlene texted again this morning. She bought the Aldi roses anyway, for a neighbor whose husband just had a stent put in, and she said she wore the gloves the whole drive over and then washed her steering wheel. The neighbor loved them. They are sitting on her counter right now, slowly releasing whatever they release, and the neighbor is recovering, and the world keeps going, and somewhere in Bogotá a woman is putting on her respirator for the second shift. I am going outside to cut witch hazel.