Flower Paradise

My two brothers and I used to ride around on our little bikes and bike-ish toys. We would make the descent from our driveway to the corner of the street, climb the hill, and repeat. Brent would ride his fire truck toy and I would ride my space ship. Both the fire truck and the space ship had seats that would flip up with a storage compartment under them – this is a key detail in the story.

Eric had his own share of toys including a giant tractor and a skate board to ride from a seated position while wearing gloves. Unfortunately he had only one pair of gloves and enjoyed riding closely to the wooden railroad ties at the boarders of some yards. When he asked me if I’d like to take a ride with him, I jumped at the opportunity. It turns out that speeding down a hill with your hands rubbing against splintered wood doesn’t feel pleasant. It also turns out that Eric could not stop the skateboard no matter how much screaming came from the passenger behind him.

Brent and I took one of our daily trips to the corner and then looked down the street perpendicular to ours. The house to the left had an amazingly abundant garden of flowers. They called to us. There were so many. How could one house possibly need all those flowers? They couldn’t.

I don’t know what conversation transpired between the two of us, or if we just both automatically knew we had to be where the flowers were. We spent the next several days on a mission. The goal seemed to be to gather as many flowers as we possibly could and store them under the boat in our garage. Nobody would find them there and know our shame.

You may be asking: “Why would you want the flowers if you were going to store them somewhere where nobody would be able to enjoy their beautiful colors?” That’s a completely valid question. I’m not claiming there weren’t any holes in our plan. All we knew was that we needed the flowers.

Our missions had the following steps:

1. Ride the fire truck and the space ship to flower paradise
2. Sneak onto the yard in mid daylight and in clear view of both the windows and door
3. Rip flowers from the ground as quickly as possible until the storage compartments of both the fire truck and the space ship were full
4. Ride the fire truck and the space ship to our garage
5. Empty the flowers from the storage compartments to under the boat

This process went on until the older kids would begin to get out of school. We knew that we would be persecuted for our flower heist, so we had to do it during a short window during the day. One afternoon, a group of big kids stumbled upon us and we high tailed it to our garage and hid out for the remainder of the day.

Everything was going smoothly until the day we were caught. My mom must have grown suspicious of our behavior and so she followed us into the garage and stumbled upon the largest stash of dead flowers in the history of the world. Needless to say she was not pleased. My great grandfather that was in town visiting was also not pleased.

Once they got us to confess where the flowers were coming from, my mom took us by the hands and marched us straight to the front door of the queen of flower paradise. I couldn’t tell you what she looked like or how she reacted to the situation unfolding before her because I was completely hysterical.

My little brother apologized for the destruction we caused to her beautiful yard and I stood there in a panic induced sob. It was that day that we learned that flower hoarding was a not lifestyle befitting us.