The Art of Arranging Flowers Read Free

works.
    Ruth Jane is the secretary at St. Bede’s Catholic and Miss Bertie is over at Harbor Light Baptist. There’s a Foursquare Gospel and a Free Methodist Church in Creekside as well as a few other Christian meeting groups, but they don’t have secretaries to order their flowers. Mostly I hear from pastors’ wives and presidents of the women’s councils of the other congregations, but Madeline and Ruth Jane and Miss Bertie are my best church contacts.
    â€œPalms,” I say, noting the date on the calendar. Madeline always calls in January, a few weeks before Ash Wednesday, to order fronds for the Palm Sunday church service. A small group of women on the altar guild dry and fold them into crosses to hand out the Sunday before Easter. It takes them at least a month to do all the work.
    The Catholics just give out the stems, so Ruth Jane doesn’t call and order until a week before the event, and the Baptists don’t order any flowers for the spring season except the lilies. They don’t care a thing about pomp and liturgy, but they do want their Easter lilies to line the stage and fill the windowsills at the sunrise service, and they do want them full and blooming when they pick them up after the eleven o’clock hour to take them home.
    â€œWe’ll have the usual,” she says, meaning she’s ordering the stripped double palms with the split leaf fronds that I get from Plant City, Florida.
    About five years ago Madeline saw a special offer listed in some church supplies catalog for palm fronds and just ordered direct when she was getting bulletins and communion wafers and qualified for free shipping. When the palms arrived—date palm fronds, stems of short, curved, green tender blades—the palm frond cross committee called an emergency meeting with the pastor and Madeline almost lost her job.
    Stripped double palms are what the members of the altar guild want, and stripped double palms are all I order. Madeline doesn’t try to pinch a penny when it comes to Palm Sunday anymore. She just tells me how many stems to order and who will be picking them up. She doesn’t even ask me if the price went up; she just confirms the number and tells me the name of which altar guild member will be stopping by when they arrive and stays out of it.
    â€œSixty?” I ask, flipping through the Lutheran church notebook that I pulled off the shelf from beneath the register.
    I use the computer calendar, but I also like to keep handwritten notes about my customers. All the regulars have their own notebooks: small spiral-bound notebooks, red, yellow, and blue ones that I buy in bulk and keep for five years before moving them to boxes in a back closet and starting over.
    â€œSounds right,” she answers. “We never have more than forty in worship, but you know how the altar guild feels about running out of palm crosses. I tried to tell them one time that we could collect the crosses we didn’t use, keep them in a good dry storage place, and save them for the next year, but you would have thought I suggested that we give the organist a raise.”
    I hear her take a breath.
    â€œThat is not how we do things, Madeline Margaret Marks.”
    And I know she’s imitating Clarise Witherspoon. Her voice is high and pinched.
    She sighs. “And that was the last time I made a suggestion to the altar guild.”
    â€œProbably for the best,” I say.
    â€œDaphne will pick them up,” she adds, knowing I have her number. “I also need to order two arrangements for Sunday’s service. It’s Lila’s birthday.” That is all the information I need.
    Lila Masterson was the matriarch of Creekside Lutheran Congregation and died about six years ago. Every spring her daughter from California calls, asking to have two vases of flowers placed in the sanctuary on the Sunday closest to her mother’s birthday. She also asks that after the service