Flower Nostalgia // Tiger Lily

Photo Credit: Royal Saskatchewan Museum

I used to pick tiger lilies in the backyard of my childhood home. They just grew there, it seemed all year-round, which isn't possible. Every memory I have is tiger lily colored. Stripey and dotted and somewhat sparkly amber, see-through copper like Visionware (remember that stuff?) or poking your sight through a keyhole that leads straight to a mid-afternoon autumn your first year of high school, complete with cheerleaders walking home from practice at 4pm, leaves crumbling to bits that will never be whole again beneath the requisite matching sneakers and rustling of pom-poms. The sun makes his last effort of the day to stream golden light down toward everybody we know, and then moves on to other places. Better places, we think.* 




Princess Tiger Lily is a character I know from Peter Pan. To me, she is mysterious and sort-of wonderful. She barely says a word so she won't betray Peter, even though this may get her killed by Captain Hook. I pick a flower for Princess Tiger Lily and put it in my wild, sun-streaked hair. Pretend, pretend. Run around in the grass with bare feet and pretend. My Grandmother has a book about our family history. In the first few pages some old ancestor gets off a European boat and kills a Native American woman who is sitting on a rock combing her hair. Several pages later, my Great-Grandmother is Cherokee (incorrectly remembered as Blackfoot, my Grandfather corrected me last October). Our personal histories can be so humbling. Sometimes even horrifying.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

I make up a club out by where the tiger lilies grow at the edge of the yard near some tall trees that separate our property from a fairground. It's called The Cat's Eye Club and to be in it, you have to drink a Styrofoam cup full of green pickle juice. This will turn you into a vampire. I get several kids on my block to do so, including my brother. We do rain dances out by the tiger lilies, I suppose because of the Princess. We keep candy cigarettes rolled up in the sleeves of our t-shirts like Greasers. Little rain-dancing, vampire Greasers. 


One day when I am about nine there is a camp of what we simply referred to as "Army guys" out back behind the tiger lilies. They've got neat camouflage tents that look like crepe paper spider's webs and big green trucks and candy. I had seen a few old movies on TV and decided my neighbor and I ought to go down there and flirt with them. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure how many old movies I had seen at that point. It may have just been my natural sway toward being a throwback to a 1940s pin-up girl. Army guys? Flirt with 'em. An obvious choice. I'm also not sure I knew what "flirt with them" truly meant, but I knew it had something to do with Betty Grable, red lipstick, and batting one's eyelashes.


What a little character. 

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

In my twenties I bought some oily perfume called Tiger Lily and wore it all summer, even though it made a rash across my skin. I traveled to Saskatchewan with my first husband (sounds so much nicer than ex-husband), where the tiger lily is the official flower...except it isn't, it's the Red Western Lily, but it looks like what we've always (erroneously, perhaps) called the Tiger Lily. I have had lipsticks and nail polish in tiger lily shades. I have been a dedicated tiger lily admirer for half my life. And yet...I would not say it is my favorite flower. It is, however the color in which my memories choose to filter themselves through, creating warm feelings of nostalgia and casting everything I know in Pantone 7578U.

xoxo,

Ashley

* We is my best friend and me, duh squared.