The fate of these flowers

I didn’t see the two women who threw the bouquet of pink and white roses into the ocean. A few of our friends had a few hours earlier. We didn’t know their story – whether the women were memorializing a loved one, honoring sea goddess Yemanjá, or mile-marking a cross-country trip with a ritual they’d freshly invented.

We know that after the toss, they took a photo together, the Pacific Ocean boasting in the background on a calm-water day that left us comfortable with our young children, pants rolled with sand up to their knees, running from a steady hum of ankle-height waves. 

I was resting on a friend’s pineapple-print beach blanket, fiddling with two broken buttons at the foot of my chambray shirt and head resting on a pillow of someone’s crumpled-up sweater. I allowed my eyes to close a few minutes at a time, chiming into conversation from a half-nap state among two mother-friends as our kids played with our partners. 

Feeling a few water drops patter onto my pant leg, I blinked open to see through smudged sunglasses my son, grin wide as a cantaloupe rind and shirtless tummy perfectly round. 

“Here, Mama,” he said, arms outstretched with two pink roses, long hunter green stems perfectly straight and thorned. 

Their leaves and petals, pristine, dangled with the weight of water, as if they’d taken the most well-earned post-beach-day shower of their flower lives. I accepted his profound offering with a tight hug (his favorite), my friends cooing and cawing at his kind act of service for his tired mother whom he consistently repays with found-nature gifts – a pinecone here, a hand-bunch of sourgrass there – as he experiences the world through its many strange and miraculous inventions. 

In the landscape portrait of him, my husband saunters toward us, wobble in his step from the unsteady sand, in the background. And in the few seconds of this expansive moment, I search for information: Who brought the flowers here in the first place? And to whom do they rightfully belong? I scan the beach for a flower peddler, an unlikely sight on this locally-loved Pacifica beach. 

Best-case scenario, they’d been abandoned by accident, and we didn’t alter their intended fate afterall. Or, was my immediate assumption that they were meant for someone passed and now in memory only, correct? 

Sure to not break the pride of my son with something as irrelevant and unnecessary as fact gathering, I inquire about where he found them, eye-locking my husband for answers. (He shrugs.) 

A friend had seen the two women throw them into the ocean earlier – we pass the information among us parents quietly over our children’s hatted heads as they resume their steady work of shoveling sand onto any foot willing to be buried. 

I shake a small bit of sand from the rose petals and tend to their faces that, while heavy, appear refreshed. Despite being thrashed by the miniature waves of today’s ocean, they are the most lovely, alive, in-tact roses I’ve seen. I smell them to see if the saltwater was kind enough to leave them with their signature characteristic. The scent is that of a muted rose water face mist.  

Abandoning sand toys near our blanket, the children run off to play again with our partners by the waves, and I look to my mother-friends, ask, “So who do you really think these were these meant for?” There’s a layer of concern dressing my face, wondering if my son’s act of love derailed the affection of another. 

I imagine the many various life paths of these flowers – how on a day of more powerful waves, they might have ended up adrift on the Farallons, mistaken as food by sea otters, floating under a pier 60 miles south in Santa Cruz, causing another perplexing episode of delightful mystery among stranger onlookers. These flowers could have ended up in a million other times and places. 

“They weren’t meant for anyone but for you,” says one of my mother-friends, smiling, as she strips apart a piece of seaweed. “You were the one they were always meant for.”

And I immediately return from this floating that I do 1,000 feet above myself when lured to the beyond. I drop back onto that pineapple-print beach blanket, wondering if what she said is in fact true – that the flowers weren’t meant for the passed loved one of the two women who threw them into the ocean hours earlier. That, instead, part of the plan all along for those flowers was for my son to find them, to gift them to his mother in the most selfless type of act, and for the energy of those flowers to transfer through my eyes, translate onto my face, root into my heart, and hold me with the tight hug of the sweet love of my wolf-hearted four-year-old who is the type of kid to notice a treasure floating atop the ocean and – then – think to gift it.