How a cottage, a fur coat, and one birthday cake became a Colorado floral design studio
The cottage still smells exactly as it should. A little musty, a little old, and entirely familiar.
Nothing really matches. Every piece is a little different, collected, recovered or reimagined over the years. Everything has a story, and depending on which family member you ask, the stories aren't necessarily the same.
But somehow, everything belongs.
We did eventually replace the Berber carpet with wood floors. Nobody has expressed any desire to bring it back.
As a child, almost every summer weekend, four generations of us filled that little cottage.
There was always a reason to gather, but my Nana never particularly needed one. Cocktail hour was every night. Hors d'oeuvres were passed. Everyone found their way to the table.
Every August Nana threw one big party for all the September birthdays, since we wouldn't be together then. And, whether it was their birthday or not, Nana made sure every grandchild had a present to open. There was vanilla cake with her homemade chocolate icing, and the particular kind of fuss that makes a person feel like their existence is something worth celebrating.
I didn't know then how unusual that feeling would become.
Because outside that cottage, I spent a remarkable amount of my life trying to figure out how to belong.
As a teenager, it was a thousand small reminders that I wasn't quite getting it right. Not cool enough. Not quite like the other girls. Always a little outside the room I wanted so badly to be in.
I got older and found a more productive way to earn my place.
I became useful.
I was good at it, too. I could help build businesses, organize the chaos, create the systems, solve the problems. I spent years making other people's ideas work, and I was very good at making myself necessary.
There's a strange kind of security in being indispensable. It can take a while to notice that you're building an entire life around things that don't belong to you.
Then I became a mother.
And I don't know how to write this part without sounding ungrateful, which is probably part of the problem.
I love my children with a ferocity I couldn't have understood before they existed. I would do it all again.
But motherhood took my hair, my body, my independence, and eventually a sense of myself I hadn't realized was so fragile.
I belonged to everyone.
Except, increasingly, me.
And I was supposed to be fulfilled by that. Some days I was. Other days I wondered where the hell I'd gone.
I didn't start Ash + Ether with some grand declaration about reclaiming my identity. I wanted to make extraordinary things with flowers. I had ideas, and for once I wanted to see what would happen if I followed them all the way through.
What I didn't anticipate was how much of myself would come along.
The business gave me somewhere to put the parts of me that had never quite found a home. The imagination. The excess. The peculiar attention to detail. The tendency to become completely unreasonable about something I think could be beautiful.
And somewhere in the process, I began to recognize myself again.
I stopped dressing for an imaginary audience. I stopped wondering whether pigtails were appropriate for a woman approaching forty. I started wearing what I liked, saying what I meant, and taking up a little more space.
I'm not suggesting I've become some perfectly self-possessed woman who never questions herself. I still have awkward conversations. I still notice when I don't quite fit.
I just no longer assume that means I need to change.
Then, on my thirty-ninth birthday, something happened.
I was at an industry retreat in Beaver Creek, wearing my Nana's fur coat. I was surrounded by people I'd only recently met, people from an industry I'd spent the last year trying to find my place in.
They sang happy birthday to me.
Someone had asked what kind of cake I liked. Vanilla with chocolate frosting, obviously.
The only cake they could find had vanilla frosting.
So they scraped it off and replaced it with chocolate.
I keep thinking about that.
About my Nana, and her ridiculous August birthday parties. About the little cottage where everyone had a present waiting. About all the years I spent trying to become the kind of person who belonged in certain rooms.
And there I was, wearing her fur, in a room full of people who hadn't known me long enough to owe me anything.
Someone had gone to the trouble of getting the frosting right.
I think that's what I've been trying to make all along.
Not just beautiful flowers. Not just extraordinary rooms.
The feeling of being considered so completely that nothing about you needs to be explained away.
Because when someone invites the people they love to witness one of the most important moments of their life, I don't think they should have to become a more acceptable version of themselves to do it.
I want their histories in the room. Their traditions. Their contradictions. Their peculiar tastes and unreasonable ideas. I want the things that make them unmistakably themselves to be the very things we make a fuss over.
I've spent enough of my life trying to fit the room.
Now I get to make the room fit the people.
And I keep coming back to one question.
What if the celebration were as extraordinary as the thing being celebrated?
