HollyHock fields

How I learned to build perennial memories

By Peyton Witzke

Three generations of childhood memories flashed before my eyes in a millisecond or less as the sweet scent filled the air. An array of colors: copper, crimson, carmine rose, icicle, sunshine, lavender, Russian yellow, summer carnival- painted the breeze. Her hands, spotted brown with wisdom and age, held a hollyhock doll.

“It takes me back to when I was an eight-year-old girl, when I could make dolls out of hollyhocks with many colors of dresses. When they were ugly in the morning, we could go to the hollyhock plant and get more.”

It was if I had disappeared completely, vanished. It was as if I had become my grandmother, who played dolls with a young Barbie for hours on end in the fields. The memories poured out of her eyes in the form of a glossed-over twinkle, yet this did not cease the storytelling that occurred through her hands. Plucking hollyhock flowers from the bushes outside of a pet store in Door County, Wisconsin, my mother took no less than five seconds to make a doll by sticking multiple flowers together of different colors, while reminiscing every step. The Marvel Company would envy the floral trinket she created.