Dollarama Wildflowers

Plant something. Anything.

The seeds are as tiny as poppy seeds, even tinier, like specks of dust, packaged in a homely, large-economy-size type box. I would say it is roughly the size of a box of Cow Brand Baking Soda.

It’s called “Wildflower Mix” and it’s an impulse purchase from my local Dollarama, the twenty-first century equivalent of Woolworth’s, the original five-and-ten-cent store (whose success ultimately gave us heiress Barbara Hutton. Barbara was so weighed down with inherited Woolworth dosh she once bought an entire village in Morocco as a dinner party venue, gifting the guests with real diamonds as party favors, and another time bought, excuse me, married, on a dare, a man called Porfirio Rubirosa.

(Porfirio was as well endowed as Barbara, but not with wealth, which is why waiters in the restaurants and resorts frequented by the nineteen-forties jet set began calling the giant pepper mills they brandished at patrons’ tables “Rubirosa’s.”

(She seems to have realized from the start what an utterly shameless gigolo he was, and, having won the bet, divorced him fifty-eight days later, paying out a handsome settlement for his trouble.

(Barbara Hutton died with only ten thousand dollars in her once billion-dollar bank account. This is usually trotted out as proof of the emptiness…