Fake and digital flowers

How dare you say I ain't fine?
Rosebud is my father
Amaranth is my mom
How dare you say I ain't fine?
If these flowers gave me life

My grandmother loves to sing this Surinamese song. The message is clear: we are pretty, because our parents are like flowers.

Meanwhile, my grandmother has a love-hate relationship with flowers. For her own house, she prefers fake ones over the real deal. When we sorted out her things, she wanted to keep all of her fake flowers. Indeed, most moved with her to her new apartment. The few that ended up in the garbage container were saved by her neighbour Bella, who lives opposite my grandmother. A sweet, but plastic memory of my grandmother, carefully placed next to a cuban planter that my grandfather gave Bella a long time ago. Now that I live in my grandmother's old house, I cannot see the fake flowers across the street and not think of her.

My grandmother does not only love fake flowers, she also adores digital flowers. Every single morning, moments after waking up, she sends out her daily morning greetings via WhatsApp. The vast majority of them depict flowers, always accompanied by a message of kindness and hope. The digital flowers are as much of a morning routine for her as they are for her many WhatsApp contacts, myself included. More importantly, the daily digital flowers tell me that she is ok. No message means that something is wrong, either with her or her iPhone charger.