PETALS: a true story about mothers and flowers and life and death.

My mom Mona was competitive. About everything. And successful, nearly all the time. She spent years running many top women’s fashion brands and when retirement was imminent mom decided to throw herself into one of her many passions.

She had always loved table top, and the beautiful accessories that made entertaining special. She took great pride in her parties from the plates and napkin rings to the fresh flowers cheering up her table and her home.

But staying home in retirement was not for my spitfire of a mother. Mom had a plan. As she loved home decor as much as she loved fashion , Mom knew all the best retail shops and had impeccable taste. She loved a store called Felissimo on West 56th Street in Manhattan, and coveted their flowers. One day, Mom approached the manager and asked to be introduced to their flower arranger.

Steve Geldman turned out to be as kind and approachable to people as he was to plants and he allowed mom to be his shadow. She frequently accompanied him to the flower market at 5:30 a.m. to pick the blossoms for his many projects. The early hour was not a problem for my insomniac mom who was already wide awake and day trading her Fidelity accounts before the crack of dawn. No moss grew under her feet.

Before long mom was not only working at Felissimo helping Steve to fill their vases with flowers but was dragging him up and down Fifth Avenue as his mouthpiece, handing his card out to any store manager who would listen. He eventually landed the Louis Vuitton gig.

Trained by the best, mom felt more confident in her own flower design skills. She boldly entered a flower show in the Berkshires, where she had a weekend home. The event was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts at Chesterwood, the historic country home of Daniel Chester French the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial.

There were multiple rooms in the mansion where the arrangements were to be displayed. Mom was assigned to the porch by the show’s committee. Her creation: a lush spectacular arrangement in a large and extremely heavy urn which my stepfather Art carefully transported to the mansion. Her urn was filled with a bountiful selection of the greatest looking sunflowers she could gather. Sunflowers were Mom’s favorite. She’d been talking about this competition for weeks.

At last the weekend of the show arrived and we traipsed up to Massachusetts from Manhattan to support Mom and her novice entry. When we all stepped into the porch room to everyone’s great excitement there was a ribbon affixed to Mona’s floral masterpiece. What a surprise! A winner… and for a first time entrant no less! Surely mom had a future in flowers.

As we finished walking through the rooms and seeing all of the ribbon-adorned vases, mom, still aglow from her own yellow ribbon, approached a flower show judge, “Just wondering, how many entrants were there in my category?” she asked.

Without cracking so much as a smirk he answered “three”. Third of three. The air went out of the room. Her third place was in fact last place. Mom was perturbed.

She asked a judge why she had not placed higher and he said her sunflowers had all been cut to the same height, and that a floral display without vertical variation was a no-no. Mom took it like a champ.

That day, Mona “earned” the nickname “Petals”. It was the first and last time she ever entered a flower competition and certainly the last time there was ever vertical equality in her floral arrangements.

At her funeral, many years later, that mentor of a florist, Steve Geldman, now a dear family friend, placed urns with multicolored sunflowers at all varying heights on either side of her casket. After she was laid to rest we brought those sunflowers home and filled the house with many vases, all containing her most favorite of flowers.

Mom always won first prize in our hearts and to this day any vase filled with those larger-than-life blossoms reminds me of the sunshine she brought to each and every room she adorned.

PS This is an actual photo of the sunflowers taken from her funeral urns and placed in vases on our mantel. Notice the Orbs in the photo that can be seen hovering above the flowers. A friend who is a medium told us that was mom’s spirit in the room.