One of the many heartwarming experiences this weekend were the adventures of the flower girl. Barely three years old, this young lady explored her surrounds, was patient during unfamiliar proceedings,

performed her job marvelously in front of the best man and maid of honor,

knew exactly what she wanted (including trying to get all the petals back into her basket,)

and, after overcoming an initial bout of shyness, was a hit on the dance floor.  Chloe, I adore you!

The history of flower girls, and that’s what they mostly are, goes back to the Romans. Little girls paraded in front of the bride, dribbling grains and herbs on the ground as a kind of offering to the Goddess of fertility. Or, as Liz Susong put it in a really funny essay on the topic “it of course represented the collective hope that this woman could also make little humans just like the ones tossing oatmeal, lest she be doomed to a life of barren dread. And this my friends, is the definition of patriarchy.”

Now, how you get from the first quoted sentence to the second escapes my feeble brain, but I nonetheless enjoyed reading her descriptions of the origins of the process, as well as its later versions during the Victorian period, where the innocence and purity of childhood was celebrated, soon to be lost by the virgin bride.

https://www.brides.com/story/where-the-flower-girl-tradition-comes-from

I also learned something else from Susong’s writing, which makes me declare a new goal in life: I want to be a flower grandma.  Elective grandma will do, given that I see no Heuer grand-babies on the near horizon (and in despairing late night thoughts about climate change consider that a sad but perhaps preferable thing….)

I am henceforth publicly available to be an Ersatz grandma, throwing flowers at a wedding, sort of like the one in the clip below, which just made me feel good for a long while.

I will, of course, also enjoy the freedom of rolling around on the dance floor when everyone else is line dancing which I am simply unable to master. Just don’t wait until I need a walker…..

Lift off!

 

And if nobody calls on me I will just sit wilting at home listening to Delibes – I know I have posted this duet before, but I just love it. Here is the Sutherland version, rather than the Nebtrebko who we heard some time back.