A River of Gold
Some flowers are grown for beauty. Some are grown for memory. Long before there was a canvas tent called Marigold at Flint & Flowers, there were tangerines, a casserole, and a little martini packed for a picnic at a family cemetery. My children were small then. They carried juice. The tangerines came along because they belonged there, and the martini was shared, at least in spirit, with a grandmother. There was no need to explain very much. We simply ate, talked, and remembered, spending an afternoon with people who were no longer here as though, for a little while, they still were. Perhaps that is the simplest way to understand Día de los Muertos.
Our celebration grew over the years. A picnic became an annual gathering, and the gathering sometimes grew to sixty people. Calaveras handmade in Mexico came out of their boxes. Food filled the tables, and photographs slowly filled the shelves: grandparents, parents, friends, people loved and missed. One shelf belonged to the four-legged family members lost that year, because remembrance has never paid much attention to species. The house became crowded with the living and, in its own way, crowded with everyone who had come before them. Make a place. Bring something good to eat. Put out the photographs. Remember.
And always, there were marigolds, or cempasúchil. A flower the color of fire and sunset, with a fragrance strong enough that tradition says the dead can follow it home, marigold petals are scattered along paths and placed on ofrendas, their brilliant orange creating a trail between the people who remember and the people being remembered. They are not solemn flowers. They seem to glow with their own light. As the gatherings grew, a few bunches were no longer enough. There needed to be armloads of them, bushels, great masses of living orange and gold.
That search for marigolds eventually wound through the Hill Country to a flower farm outside Blanco, where Pamela and Frank Arnosky had been growing flowers since 1990. Their own road to the Día de los Muertos marigold began years earlier, when San Antonio artist Debra Vasquez, known as Kwetzpalin, came to the young farm and helped explain why this particular flower mattered. Customers began returning each autumn in search of cempasúchiles. A few flowers became fields, and the fields became truckloads.
Published accounts describe some 25,000 bunches leaving the Arnosky farm for San Antonio and South Texas during the autumn season. A refrigerated truck could be filled through the afternoon and evening, leave the Big Blue Barn around four in the morning, return, and be filled again. Marigolds moving south before sunrise.
Years ago, a friend who grew up in a small town in Mexico spoke of how much she loved seeing trucks full of marigolds traveling down the road each autumn. She knew where they were going. There is something wonderful about imagining all those flowers in motion. They begin together in fields, thousands upon thousands of almost identical orange blooms, and then slowly separate. A truck becomes bushels. Bushels become bunches. Bunches disappear into cars, kitchens, churches, and cemeteries, until one enormous harvest has become thousands of small, private acts of remembrance.
Years later, the same river of flowers appeared again, this time in Mexico City. The whole family was there as Día de los Muertos approached, and at Mercado de Jamaica, the great flower market, cempasúchil seemed to be everywhere. Trucks arrived heavy with orange blooms, while merchants who had begun working before sunrise moved flowers through the market by the thousands. From there, they flowed outward again into neighborhoods, across plazas, toward cemeteries, and onto ofrendas.
We had to fly home the day before the great parade, but it hardly mattered. The city was already becoming the celebration. Along Paseo de la Reforma, the intricate parade floats were already on display, and gold was moving through it.
Perhaps that is why the marigold feels so perfectly suited to Día de los Muertos. The celebration does not ask grief to disappear; it surrounds grief with life. Candles flicker, papel picado moves in the breeze, tangerines pile beside photographs, someone brings a favorite food, someone pours a favorite drink, and children learn the names of people they never had the chance to know. Everywhere, orange petals make a path.
Flowers have always been good at carrying things words cannot. They arrive at births and funerals, travel down wedding aisles, and rest on graves. A grandmother grows one variety, and decades later her granddaughter plants the same flower without quite knowing why. A flower is pressed between the pages of a book because something happened on the day it was picked that should not be forgotten. A casserole and some tangerines become a picnic at a grave. A picnic becomes a gathering. A gathering creates a search for marigolds. The search leads to a flower farm. The flower farm sends truckloads south. A friend remembers those trucks from Mexico. Years later, a family stands in Mexico City and watches another river of gold pass before them.
And eventually, back among the juniper and limestone of the Texas Hill Country, a little canvas tent receives a name: Marigold. Guests seem particularly drawn to her. Perhaps flowers carry their stories whether we tell them or not.
Día de los Muertos reminds us that remembering someone is not the same as refusing to let them go. It is simply allowing love to keep its place. You were here. You mattered. We remember. And every autumn, for a few brilliant weeks, the marigolds begin moving again, a river of gold flowing from fields to markets, from markets to homes, from the living toward the dead, and somehow, beautifully, back again.
Some flowers are grown for beauty. Some are grown for memory.
Arnosky Family Farms / Texas Specialty Cut Flowers, near Blanco, Texas.
Inspired by What Grows Wild.
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