Remembering A Pressing Hobby

                                               
                                                 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.