Ceramic Flower Lettuce Grey XL 5

In times of crisis, I've found that people tend to gravitate toward the unusual and inexplicable. Take my sister, who once devoted six weeks to learning ventriloquism using nothing but YouTube videos and a sock puppet named Kenneth. But my current fixation – a massive grey ceramic flower that could double as a shield in medieval combat – seems almost reasonable by comparison. "It's the exact color of a thunderstorm," I told my mother over FaceTime, tilting my phone to capture its cement-like grandeur. "The artist clearly channeled all the drama of a cloudy day in Seattle, though it mostly reminds me of the time you accidentally washed Dad's white dress shirts with your new charcoal yoga pants." The piece came with a keyhole mount that my father said made it look like "modern art having an identity crisis." But there was something magnificent about its brutalist charm, its complete disregard for subtlety. I mounted it in the kitchen, replacing a vintage advertisement for canned peas that my brother had rescued from a dumpster behind an antique store. "It would be perfect in a nursery," I suggested to my husband, who was busy pretending not to notice that I'd rearranged the kitchen again. "That's what you said about the collection of preserved butterflies you bought at that estate sale," he reminded me. "The ones that gave our nephew nightmares." But this was different. The flower had transformed our kitchen from a mere food preparation space into what felt like dining inside a Georgia O'Keeffe painting – if O'Keeffe had worked exclusively in grayscale and been really, really into oversized wall decorations that confused dinner guests.