Chance and Flower sellers

Chances and flower sellers

At our farmer’s market we have two flower stalls, and one of them had cosmos for bedding out. Really beautiful high plants, with vigorous stems. The colour of the stem tells you which colour the blossoms will be: dark red have a much darker red stem than pink ones, and the stems of the whites are just green. And so I snapped the chance and bought 30 plants, although I carried already quite a lot of shopping. But I have learned this in the years of gardening: when the opportunity arises, one has to clasp it, no matter how packed one is. This is true for everyday life, too, you can’t say: “Luck, today doesn’t suit me, I have already so much to carry – please come again next week, on Thursday, at about 12:15 pm, then it will be more convenient for me.” Then luck will walk away and knock at another door.
The other flower stall I passed by quickly, because I have an unexpressed problem with the flower seller.
First I bought a lot from her, because her perennials come out of her private garden and so are from local soil. I was a garden greenhorn then – and at that time she gave me the advice, neither to fertilize nor to water - that would only pamper and wet-nurse the plants. I thought: “Wow, that sounds nice – then I have a lot less to do.”
But in the course of time I realized that the roses sometimes need a little fertilizer although our earth is rich, the lilies, too – and when once in a blue moon the sun shines four weeks without end one has to water too.
Well, and that flower seller, whose garden must be a wasteland by now, demands for her nameless perennials a lot of money. “45 Euro I must have for that peony”, she says for example with slightly pursed lips. Always it is: “I must have”, as if a Supreme Being dictates her the price. (But a number of the hardened delphiniums I bought from her made an ascension to heaven in the same way as the so-called weaklings of the commercial trader did).
Because for a while I have been such a good customer she now looks at me expectantly when I come to the farmer’s market, and that gnaws at my conscience, and I feel as Doctor Vaes’ wife in Timmermann’s novel “St. Nicholas in Trouble” might have felt, when she didn’t buy the luxurious chocolate ship “The Congo” but only two gingerbread cocks on a stick – “and then long time no see” …
I too rush past the flower-seller to the unemotional ‘commercial’ trader, who sells me hardened plants for a fair prices.
And the flower seller follows me with her eyes like Timmermann's Trinchen Mutzer, “whose heart had fallen into a thornbush”…