If I were a flower (or herb, or some other plant) I would choose to be...... because:
Valerie: Bachelor Buttons. My Mom's favorite flower. Small and plucky, tough (that would describe me, if I were this flower). I could look them up to confirm that I am right, but they grow, at least according to my childhood memory, amid the dusty rocks in the semi-arid parts of Central and Eastern Oregon. She loved these little guys-- purple, mostly, pale lavender and darker bluish purple, sometimes a kind of pinky purple color, with stiff, flute-like petals sticking out to make a star around a kind of ball-shaped center.
Her last birthday among us, we baked her favorite cake (angel food) and frosted it with her favorite frosting (cooked white) and decorated it all over with the blossoms. She smiled from her bed. Prettiest flowers I ever saw, that made her smile.
John: I would be a bed of black-eyed Susans. Why? Well, it's one of the best flower names I know. Who is this black-eyed Susan? She sounds like a beautiful girl who you wouldn't want to double-cross. A gypsy girl with a tambourine, gold earrings, and a cigarette hanging from her lips. Then there's that great color combination -- a not-at-all-bashful yellow anchored to that somber, almost mysterious brown/black center. And the way they grow, even when there are dozens of them all together you can still see each bold flower claiming its place. To me, they look assured, cheerful, healthy, and proud -- qualities I aspire to.
Jay: I would want to be a pansy.
When I was working in Salt Lake City, which is, of course, somewhere between the third and fourth circles of Hell, it snowed three feet in two days. I'd learned to drive in California, so this was naturally a catastrophe for me. I looked out the window, waiting for the snow plows to come by. For hours. Nothing. Finally, the hotel plowed the parking lot, which plowed me in. At around 10 am, I decided I had to go into the office, even though it would be empty. It was only about four or five blocks away. I was a tough, traveling consultant and wouldn't let a little natural disaster get between me and a billable hour.
So I climbed out to the car - without gloves or a scarf - and finally managed to get the driver's side door open and my wet, cold self inside. The windshield wipers was reasonably effective on the snow on the windshield, but the layer of ice took the defroster about five minutes to thaw. The real shock was that the rear window defogger had no impact on the eight inches of snow mounded on the back window. After about fifteen minutes, I found a little, plastic window scraper on the floor of the back seat.
I got out and started to use the scraper, but found it was much easier to just push the snow off the back window and the trunk with my bare hands. Once back inside, it took a few minutes before I could feel my hands again, then a few more to be able to curl my fingers enough to manage the steering wheel and the automatic transmission.
I tried backing out, then rocking back and forth to get over the mound of snow plowed up behind me. I got out a few times and kicked some of it away (luckily I'd bought some pretty sturdy hiking boots the summer before - they were leather because the client with whom I was to be hiking and who was with me when I bought the boots, is deathly afraid of snakes and wouldn't hear of me buying the lighter weight, but less snake-proof, boots). Finally, I got out of the space and was on my way! Until I tried to merge into traffic and slid backwards into the parking lot.
After a little rocking back and forth, and a very nice older woman stopping to wait for me to get into the flow of traffic, I was nearly there! The nice covered parking garage (the office was in an office tower above a downtown mall) was in sight.
After one red light, for which the car stopped with minimal sliding, I was approaching the garage. I applied the brake and turned the wheel right, which caused an elegant, smooth, sideways slide on the icy street right past the entrance. The radio had been reminding people to steer into the slide all morning, which now seemed counter-intuitive, but was effective. I had to drive around the block and, while passing the temple made a promise to the spirit of Joseph Smith to buy a copy of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's greatest hits. I also noticed in the second or third turn that there seemed to be a connection between turning the wheel, braking and sliding sideways.
Almost an hour after I left the hotel, I finally walked into the office to find all of the locals had been on time, driving down the mountain or from suburbs, as much as an hour away on a good day. The consultants straggled in over the next hour or so, until about noon, with hair-raising stories about their five-block drives.
The next Monday, I arrived at the hotel to find the snow had melted some, and the pansies that had been planted along the parking lot curb a few weeks before were maybe a little worse for wear, but still alive. I had new respect for the tough little pansies with their garish, simple colors. And, when someone calls me a pansy, I say thanks.
Steve: I was going to choose something more discreet but then I realized that what I'd really love to be is one of those big old climbing roses that grows more than a story tall, with a sturdy thick trunk and masses of dense, intertwined branches, covered for months of every year with thousands of pale pink roses. Maybe I'd grow over an old stone cottage and still be there even after the roof falls in. I would make it a wonderful spot for picnics, photo shoots, and fairies.
Val L.: Lilacs; because- who wouldn't want to smell like that? They also lined my back yard as a child growing up and when I lived on Nantucket Island there was a big tree/bush right by my window and the smell of them plus the ocean is one of my favorite memories of my entire life.
John M.: Like Maude, in "Harold and Maude", I'd want to be a sunflower, big and bold, taller than everyone else. Or else I'd like to be a pansy with the little old man face.
Terence: I'd choose to be a White Dixie Belle Hibiscus and I'd float in the summer breeze just as fragile and formidable as you please.
Once I'd been that for a season or two I'd appear as a hydrangea clear and sky blue. I'd stay like this for as long as I should, a lifetime of summers as joyous as I could.
A third act would follow as a rhododendron in bloom. A patient death the color of a garnet with no rhyme or reason I'd die back.
Unlikely to be satisfied as a mere mortal...
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