Ivory European Water Lily

When my sister called to tell me she'd bought me a ceramic flower from some company called Chive, I pictured one of those tacky yard ornaments our grandmother used to collect – the kind that attracted both mosquitoes and neighborhood ridicule. 'It's for your wall,' she said, as if that made it better. I imagined a porcelain disaster that would make my Paris apartment look like a retirement home in Tampa. But then it arrived in this impossibly elegant box, like something you'd get from Hermès if Hermès sold giant flowers instead of scarves. The bloom itself was white, the sort of pristine white that makes you nervous to touch it with human hands. It had the scale of something Alice might encounter after drinking the wrong potion in Wonderland. 'It's been their thing for a decade,' she told me later, clearly pleased with herself. 'Chive, I mean. They're like the Picasso of ceramic wall flowers, if Picasso had better taste and a gift-wrapping department.' I hung it above my sofa, where it catches the afternoon light in a way that makes my French neighbors pause on their way up the stairs. 'C'est très chic,' they say, and for once, they're not being ironic. Though I still catch them staring at it through my windows, which I choose to take as a compliment.

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