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Poppy in White
Poppy Calhoun had a calling. Not a job, not a lifestyle, not even a “personal aesthetic” as those downtown girls with podcasts might say. No, Poppy had a calling, and it came in shades of milk and moonlight.
She lived her entire life in white. Not just white, mind you—white, ivory, cream, vanilla bean, frosted pearl, alabaster, and on occasion, when she was feeling wild, a daring ecru. Her closet was a snowy spectrum. Her front porch was flanked by white hydrangeas the size of small cabbages. Even her rescue cat, Blanche, wore a tiny linen collar the color of whipped meringue. Poppy’s hair was the palest ‘Targaryen’ blonde.
Poppy was a Flower Stylist, the kind of florist who didn’t just arrange blossoms—she curated floral poetry. Her studio, tucked into the back of an old house with chippy paint and floorboards that creaked like your Aunt ’s Sophie’s knees, was the kind of place you whispered in without realizing why. Brides-to-be came from three counties just to sit on her marshmallow velvet loveseat and imagine what their big day might smell like.
“I specialize in white weddings,” Poppy would say, smiling like a secret. “Not just the flowers. The feeling.”
And Lord help the woman who asked for red roses.
Each bridal consultation included tea served in antique china and one perfectly plated slice of her famous White Cake White Icing. It was part gesture, part ritual, part spell. Two layers, snowy and soft, flavored with almond and something Poppy would never admit out loud but might be a dash of coconut extract. The frosting was a whipped cloud of buttercream that made grown women cry and one groom-to-be propose to Poppy by mistake.
“It’s like eating a silk pillow,” one bride whispered reverently, as though sugar could be sacred.
Of course, not everyone understood her devotion to the palette.
“Don’t it ever feel a little… sterile?” her cousin Susie Lou asked once, waving a rhinestone-studded nail at Poppy’s kitchen, where even the salt and pepper shakers were shaped like porcelain swans.
“It feels peaceful,” Poppy replied. “Besides, have you ever seen a stain on a white tablecloth and not remembered the exact moment it happened? White holds memory. It’s honest.”
Susie blinked, popped her gum, and muttered, “Well, alright then, Sister Ghost.”
But the brides understood. And the flowers did too. Casablanca lilies, Queen Anne’s lace, garden roses, dusty miller, lisianthus, gardenias that bruised if you so much as looked at them cross-eyed—Poppy coaxed them all into clean, dreamy arrangements that looked like moonlight had decided to get married.
By year’s end, she’d sent fifty-seven brides down the aisle in a soft cloud of cream and calm. And each one of them said the same thing, months later, in thank-you notes edged with dried petals:
“I still think about that cake. And the calm. And how white, in your hands, felt like the warmest thing in the world.”
Which just proves what Poppy always said: White’s not cold. It’s hope with frosting.
ORDER a fine art print of White Cake White Icing here.
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