A few months ago, I took my first ikebana class with two mom friends I met in the early, blurry days of parenthood. It was an opportunity for us to slow down, to make deliberate choices, and chase the satisfaction of spending time to get something just right. It taught me to notice space and to notice balance. All things you can’t do when you’re tripping on toys and chasing a toddler down the halls.

That same week, I got flowers and a kenzan and bowl for Mother’s Day. For those who don’t know, a kenzan is a spiked block that’s placed in a bowl or pot, and flower stems are stuck into the needles to hold them in place. Anyway, my husband isn’t really one for grand gestures, so it meant something. It was a nudge toward continuing something I found creative and grounding.

Now when I get flowers, I plan to arrange them first. As my Mother’s Day flowers faded, I pressed a few that I liked into the pages of my heaviest books.

My bookshelf is full of hidden pressed flowers. Some have notes on the pages in which they’re pressed: who gave them to me, what I was going through, why I saved that one. There’s one from a walk with my dog, one from my first Mother’s Day, oh, and even one from my brother. After I left a long relationship. I lived alone and hadn’t done the dishes in days. The depression pile was growing. He surprised me flowers and tackled them for me.

Back then, I thought flowers meant love. And they did, in a way. But they don’t mean what I once thought. They’re not proof on their own.

Now, love looks different. More solid. Less showy. A love that does your dishes. A love that remembers your particular orders. A love that notices. A love that’s stable.

This month, I started turning a few of my pressed flowers into bookmarks as a special gift for a beloved friend, one that I took the ikebana class with. And now flowers do so much more than wilt away in a vase of water. It’s a quiet way to hold something from a moment that mattered and turn it into something beautiful.