Flowers from the Garden

For all intents and purposes, this is just a tea canister. I found it last week, tucked among the shelves of a thrift shop. Its lid had been cracked in several places and carefully repaired sometime along the way. It was beautiful — and essentially useless for the purpose for which it had been made. Naturally, I couldn’t leave it behind. And somewhere between bringing it home and deciding what on earth I was going to do with it, another question occurred to me: Will it vase? By golly, it will. And perhaps that’s this week’s invitation: when you’re looking for something to hold a handful of flowers, forget the vase aisle entirely. Pitchers, crocks, jars, tureens, tea canisters — some of the loveliest vessels were never intended to be vases at all. Sometimes all an old thing needs is someone willing to imagine another life for it.