Remembering A Pressing Hobby
Growing up in India, I spent a
lot of time with my numerous cousins and friends walking around the countryside
and abundant woods. I collected pretty flowers - the wild everlasting ones,
vegetable flowers - potato or garlic and various blooms from the garden -
roses, fuchsias, poppies. I’d place them in between newspaper sheets and press
them under the rice and flour barrels, or under the mattress over the hard
cots, and sometimes under the flat legs of the teapoy. I preferred the
encyclopedias and my textbooks because they were the heaviest.
With dried flowers I made birthday
cards. I was not sure how to preserve the colors. Usually, the flowers would
dry out to a brown. I’d outline my dried, pressed flowers with colorful felt
pens.
There were no reference books to
improve my preserving skills. The internet wasn’t in existence back then.
During a school trip to Malaysia in my
tenth standard, one of the tours included a visit to a small industry where
they bred scorpions and butterflies. The colorful butterflies and scorpions
were killed, pressed, and inserted between glass as paperweights and key
chains. Somehow the color of the butterflies was retained. Even though I was impressed,
being afraid of scorpions and with an aversion to killing insects, I knew I
could never do anything similar. With my dad’s help I used the idea to make
pressed flower keychains and paperweights.
And of course, I continued pressing the
florets, leaves, and ferns I deemed pretty. This became my favorite hobby
throughout my high school years. Mom cherished my card-making craft and often helped
me. She would never move my crisp collections. She was never sure when I would
start rummaging around the house in search of my dried treasures.
After I graduated from high school,
my long countryside walks came to an end. College years consisted of walks
through the dry, sandy campus, the busy streets of the college city, or along
the airport roads. There were no more flowers to press.
Life turned busy after I graduated,
married, had kids, and moved to the United States. My long walks continued
again in the community where I lived, but I could no longer pluck flowers. Instead
I was running behind my toddlers. As they grew, there were hurried walks amidst
driving the children around activities, cooking, and so on. No one plucked
flowers from gardens in America. My flower-pressing hobby was soon
forgotten.
Now that my kids are away at college, I continue
my walks around my community. I crave it. Today, I am inspired to write this
article because on my side of the community there’s been a dried-pressed frog
on the road for the last few months. On a street on the other side of the
development, a baby turtle is dried pressed to the asphalt.
I feel a pang of pity at how these
creatures were killed.
Don’t know why, but my mind races back to
the more pleasant flower-pressing hobby.
