Little Hearts Collection for Children
The Little Hearts Collection is coming soon!
A letter from Ashana’s father, Joel to Ashana on her 16th birthday.
I would love to bring a bunch of flowers for your 16th birthday, but alas, I cannot. I will just have to remember your love of flowers, fresh and dried, and think how well they suit you. I wonder if a child, six years old, is still sitting among the dandelions by the railroad tracks? I watch closely as you wind the yellow chains around your head, which you weave about yourself like a garment. As if, even then, you sensed how flowers bind us to fantasy.
I saw this again when my mother’s flowery kimono seemed no more than a piece of meadow turf, cut and draped over your shoulders. It might have been a wedding garment. On that day you showed me your wedding flowers: white feverfew and blood red snapdragons. I forgot at once to arrange the weddings and examined instead the tones and colors, lost in the panicle of white stars against a red velvet sky.
I am not naïve. I know you have not stepped from a painting of Rosetti. But I wonder Persephone, do you know what you bear within you? It’s not the ancient scene that bothers me: a young girl picking wildflowers, Pluto watching hungrily in the wings. It’s those who want this fantasy more than gold or uranium, who plan to bind and deform it, like the feet of Chinese babies. No one will know what fantasy could do if we were free. No one thinks to warn the children, as they play in the parks at dusk.
You seem oblivious, but that’s the way you are. You lead a charmed life and stubbornly cut the purple spires or delphiniums for the kitchen table, even after I’ve told you three times not to do it because flowers, you insist, are your birthright.
Of course I agree with you. But it’s not only four thousand miles of ocean that blocks my vision. I am blinded by flowers. I can’t even see across the table because of your huge flower arrangement, which seems even larger and wider now than the ocean which separates us. These I am thinking of on your birthday. Your biography written in flowers.
With love,
Daddy
