This spring and summer have flown by with weddings and events, and starting this week, we’ll be busy again through the winter season. I had two free weekends with no weddings, so I took the last week of the summer off to spend time with my best friend from college, Kim, and her family in Nantucket. We ate seafood - smoked bluefish (which might be up there with last meals), lobster, white fish (forget the name). I read a book, an actual book. Most of the time when I say I’m reading, I’m actually just listening to an audio book. I played with Kim’s two year old son, Ezra, and he filled my heart with so much joy. Kids are the sweetest, and Ezra might be the coolest two year old I’ve ever met. Zero terrible twos there - I didn’t know that was possible!
Some days I woke up with the sunrise, and worked on my laptop on the deck for a few hours - so, so hard to completely shut off your brain when you own a small business. Other days, I slept in, had breakfast with fam, went on long, long beach walks, a swim in the ocean, sat on the deck to read in the sun for the day, make dinner, read, repeat.
Being on vacation gave me so much time to think, and also so much time to not think. I bought flowers for Kim at Bartlett’s Farm. Sunflowers, because they really have become my new favorite flower this summer - think I started to fall in love with them at the NYC bodegas. I found myself just staring at them, in a daze...often. Kind of like how you stare at the water, the ocean. Now, granted, the flowers were in the most beautiful window with seagrass and the Atlantic Ocean in the background, but still. Even though I work with flowers, I still want to have them in vases around the house. I feel like it’s a way to say, I care about how you feel when you’re in this space. Or it’s a way to say, I care about how I feel in this space. It’s little things like adding flowers to a vase and placing it on the counter or the bedside table, adding pumpkins to the front steps, or hanging wreaths to doors, that just feel special. Making our spaces beautiful truly does something to how we feel inside. If a messy room is a messy head, then a room with flowers is…a more peaceful mind?
It made me wonder about Feng Shui with flowers. I’ve heard before that dried flowers actually are bad feng shui because they give off stagnant energy, the opposite of chi. I have to agree. Unless your dried flowers are intentionally made as an arrangement, then it just feels like a forgotten vase. Even then, why dry? Why not fresh? The vitality from fresh flowers adds depth and positive energy to our spaces. Flow, movement. There’s a latin superstition that my mom told me once years ago when I was about 11 years old — if you want good luck in the New Year, you have to have your house cleaned top to bottom before midnight, to keep things fresh. It’s something I still carry with me today. Another one I have picked up along the years, is to have a bowl of fresh citrus out on New Year’s Eve to welcome in a fresh start to a new year. Intention setting. I have been promoting our Flower Subscriptions lately, and it’s a product that I can truly stand behind because I am a flower subscriber, too. I love to enjoy fresh flowers on the kitchen counter or in my bedroom. I love to notice how they’re doing each day, to see how long they last and to feel impressed by that. I love to notice the color changes or the different stages of blooming. Fresh flowers, to me, are always like turning the light off at the end of the day in the kitchen, a “work is done, the last T is crossed, eye brows just waxed” kind of feeling. Even though we all know that the work, whatever the work, is never really is done, it feels good to feel accomplished in those tiny moments. Flowers remind me to take a pause and calm down for a moment. That no matter what’s happening around me, I am taking the time to enjoy the flowers and simple pleasures that the day presents to me.
I wasn’t ready to head back from my trip on Thursday, which was my initial plan, so I booked a long weekend on the Cape and had even more of the best time. I stayed in between Ptown and Wellfleet, two areas I love so so much and just walked and walked - the beaches, the downtowns, the art galleries. There are so many art galleries. I cooked a lot and did a little bit of work, because it’s kinda unavoidable at times. Went to a Schitt’s Creek drag show - hilarious. When in Ptown, am I right? Highlight was overhearing a shop owner talk about the Oyster and Art Crawl happening that day so I signed up and ate more oysters and saw more art. How many oysters and art is too much? I lost count, and possible that that number doesn’t exist. It rained that day and I was solo and met some of the loveliest people on that crawl. I’ll always order Wellfleet Oysters whenever I see them on the menu from now on.
Also a highlight, walking along a beach in Ptown, Herring Cove I think, and seeing a seal about ten feet from shore. I did go swimming on the first day of my solo trip, in the bay across from my Airbnb. The water was warm and a townie was kinda shocked that I was going in. It was end of September, but Kim approved when we were in Nantucket and she’s a vet and I trust her. Later that day, once I started to visit other beaches, all of them had signs saying that Great White Sharks, in fact, frequent these beaches. I didn’t go in the water after that, and truly couldn’t believe how close the seal was to shore. I’ve never seen that anytime I’ve been on the cape.
I love to be busy, probably love it a little too much, but it felt so good to take a step away and plant myself in another location. Very true when they say that filling up your own cup is how you can be there for others. Feeling inspired and grounded for our wedding this week and I can’t wait to dive into our first fall event of the season. My mom and I were talking the other day about how we have both converted to loving fall more these days. We both used to be the type to never want summer to end, and I’m still kind of in that category but I also feel like if you don’t embrace the season you’re in, you’ll also be missing the past a little bit too much. My mom also said she feels that the fall is romantic, and if you know my mom with her Nicaraguan accent, she sounded so cute while saying it. She also did get married in the fall, but yes, I do agree, fall can be romantic. You’ve Got Mail? Sweetest Day? Making a mental note to post about Sweetest Day this week and offer a fun giveaway or a way for people to order flowers. It’s basically a holiday that’s like Valentine’s Day but celebrates all kinds of love, not just romantic love. It’s celebrated in the midwest, but not so much on the east coast. It would be fun to bring it here!
Colors for this seasons events call for oranges, deep plum and burgundy, always a little bit of pastels in blush and light blue, can’t help myself. I would love to get my hands on porcelain berry, something that you can never really order from a wholesaler. I’ve only seen it growing on a chain link fence on a side street a couple of times. I’m hoping to find it this year. It’s so unusual and so beautiful. Love that it has freckles and the blueish color is so dramatic. And yes, mom - romantic!
I can’t wait to share with you about all of the exciting events coming up this season. We have holiday pop-ups lined up and three more workshops planned with Flat Vernacular - look to the full list of workshops here. We’re working on a table scape for Flat Vernacular’s exhibition in the Designed to Dine event happening at Wee Burn Country Club in Darien on October 25th. And there’s one more event that I can’t wait to share with you, but I’m just waiting for the full details to be confirmed before I do.
Today was one of those beautiful fall days that felt like summer and I somehow managed to sneak in two beach walks today, one in the morning and one after art class. I know I’ll be slammed these next few days so I wanted to savor the warm weather. I saw perennial daisies in bloom, and I keep meaning to mention/ask about everyone’s hydrangeas. It wasn’t a great year for hydrangeas this summer in New England. I have had a few talks with my mom’s cousin, Henry, who also takes care of my parents’ lawn, about their hydrangeas. At the beginning of the season, I thought the plants were dead - they only showed big leafy green leaves with no flowers in bloom. One of their plants had flowers, but the other two, zilch. On my walks, I’ve noticed the same thing. Full hydrangea bushes with no flowers, or some flowers that had pre-maturely aged and became the antique/fall kind in the middle of August. A summer without hydrangeas is not right. Henry said it’s best to give each plant flower food this year - I bought a bag of organic outdoor plant food and poured it on top of each plant. Apparently, because of the very dry summer that we had last year, it stunted growth in the hydrangea for this year. We had so much rain this year, wondering what that will mean for the hydrangeas next year.