I don't care for flowers. Once, in Germany, I mentioned to my guest mother that I couldn't really smell flowers. Ich kann nicht Blumen riechen, I probably said. The words broke her heart. She insisted I see a doctor when I got back to the States, that I was missing as much of the stuff of life as music or sunshine.
Years later, I know it wasn't true. It's not, these days, so much that I can't smell flowers as it is that my sensing them olfactorily connects to no fond memories. Flowers smell like funerals and hospital visits. It's hard to find a fondness.
If forced at gunpoint to pick a flower to look at for the rest of my life I'd weigh my options. I'd eye the gun, eye this deranged forcer of others' fate. This decider. I'd look at the ground to say, "I don't know, a snapdragon?"
You can't fiddle with a daisy. Not without stripping it bare.
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