Not everyone wants a dead mouse in the mail. This is a lesson I learned the hard way; the lesson snuck in somewhere between building my floral design company, accidentally branding myself “the taxidermy lady,” and falling in love with a man who didn’t want mice or any other kind of preserved creature in his home.
The idea of gracing people I loved and appreciated with something I loved and appreciated made perfect sense (even if this sentence may not).
In 2013, I moved my floral studio out of my house and into my first of eventually three, design studios. Business was going well but I was struggling to define my “brand,” that purely internet era phenomenon that dictates your work and personality should collapse into something instantly recognizable. Then, and only then, could I “manifest” or “attract” my perfect client and live happily ever after on Instagram seeking approval from strangers forever, and ever, Amen.
When I first started in 2005, I took on any client I could. I didn’t worry about an identity as much as I worried about feeding my kids. But by the mid 2010s, I’d had enough success to realize that what really fueled my soul were unique clients who loved desert design as much as I did and who were willing to take risks with their floral designs. I wanted to attract more couples drawn to the desert and maybe even drawn to something weird like a cow skull centerpiece or antler handle bouquet. I needed the industry to know I was willing to design with just about anything organic and quirky.
Yearly I entered an industry tabletop design competition. I’d won a couple times, but this year I wanted to come out with a table that said “this is me!” I built a table around a set of antlers I’d inherited from my grandpa. They’d once been nailed to the back of his house in Globe, Arizona. Now they were centerpieces.
I paired them with champagne sequin linens and gold flatware. I found photos on Etsy of anthropomorphic portraits of deer wearing Victorian garb. I hung them above my table as if they were a bride and groom. I purchased vintage cake topper figurines and decapitated them (too morbid?) and replaced their heads with tiny plastic animals. I spray painted them gold and used them as place cards for my imaginary wedding guests.
After eight years in business, the Phoenix wedding industry had a new darling. Venues wanted to work with me, planners wanted my card. At another networking event one such planner approached and I could tell she couldn’t remember my name, “you’re the taxidermy lady!”
I guess the nickname isn’t too far from the truth. I grew up around it. My grandpa had a room filled with mounts. Some kids might have been afraid of the bear, or mountain lion — both mounted as rugs but hung on the wall — their plastic jaws agape, plaster tongue curled against fiercely carved teeth. I loved that room. I knew what it felt like to pet a brown bear, what quail feathers felt like between my fingers. It was a built-in fantasy world where I was a wood nymph surrounded by her forest friends.
As an adult I started collecting shabby old mounts from flea markets and antique malls. My mother and most of my female relatives thought it was bizarre yet my mother has purchased taxidermy for me for holidays and sent along photos of pubs adorned with mounts on a recent trip to Europe. My brothers appreciated it and would send me craigslist listings. My dad understood it. He too had collected skulls and once kept a dried horseshoe crab he’d found on a beach as a kid. He recognized a naturalist’s curiosity.
The love of taxidermy drew me to natural history museums. I devoured Kingdom Under Glass by Jay Kirk, a book about Carl Akeley who transformed taxidermy from a cheap imitation of a once-living-creature to a meticulously lifelike rendering. Taxidermy was now an art. In 2017, my now husband, but then very new boyfriend, took me to the American Museum of Natural History. I walked into the Hall of African Mammals and started to cry. There were some of Akeley’s elephants, 100 years old and still uncannily present and alive despite being very dead. He asked me if I was Ok and looked concerned and confused. He thought I wanted to go to the museum…I rushed around to each diorama pointing out the details like the faux leaves on tiny branches, explaining how they’d once been created one by one by wax impressions made on site when they collected their taxidermy specimens. I’m sure my guy was bewildered but I read it at the time as charmed. Sometimes I get in my feels and I misread the room.
I hadn’t quite accepted “the taxidermy lady” as a likely brand. I was networking at an industry function yet again, when I entered a raffle and won a session with a well-known brand consultant and Instagram expert. She was universally loved in the Phoenix wedding and events world. She was hip, she was cool, she’d mastered all things social media and had figured out how to influence. The first one of those I’d met in the flesh. I felt unworthy and a little “small potatoes” but she was kind and charming and I mistook a marketer’s charm for genuine enthusiasm and a little parasocial friendship. She told me to lean into the taxidermy; it was my brand.
I wanted to thank her for her time and a “shout out” on social media just didn’t seem enough. I could send a thank-you note. Maybe something with a heart on it, which was this consultant’s brand. Heart-print everything. Wait? A thank you tied to branding? Maybe I should include my branding as well. After all, she’s the genius who guided me here! Yes! Perfect!
I went to Etsy and commissioned a taxidermy mouse holding a heart in his tiny mouse paws. The artist removed the original tail and replaced with clay which she would sculpt into a more pleasing and adorable shape. It was the cutest taxidermy I’d ever laid eyes on. I packaged him carefully and sent him along with my gushing thanks and new business cards, complete with a logo, centering antlers as part of my brand.
She thanked me. Politely. Uneasily. There was no shout out featuring an adorable heart-holding mouse on any social media and she never sought me out at industry functions.
I didn’t learn.
The boyfriend, now husband is a huge sports fan. I decided the ultimate expression of my love was to share with him something I love, you get the picture by now. I commissioned a shadow box with a mouse in a tiny Arizona Cardinals jersey complete with tiny foam finger. We’d reached the “here’s a key to my place” stage in our relationship and I used it to leave my wrapped mousy gift on his kitchen counter.
Days passed. We spoke via text but no mention of Mr. Mouse. Finally, I asked if he liked my present. “I’ve been trying to think of a nice way to tell you,” he said, “that I don’t want a dead mouse in my house. I appreciate the thought though, I just don’t think it’s for me.”
I took the mouse back. But eventually, our lives merged. I offered to sell parts of my collection, to store important pieces with my family “in case this doesn’t work out.” Instead, he gave me the formal living and dining rooms to decorate with antique furniture and my menagerie. Some mounts were too tall for the ceilings. “That’s why we picked a house with a family room with vaulted ceilings,” he said. He helped me hang the heavy ones. A few Christmases ago, I found a buffalo mount. “He’d look great over the fireplace,” was his response to my text; a photo of the mount and a whole bunch of heart-eyed emojis.
This, I think is love. Not everyone wants a dead mouse in the mail, but the people who love you will make space for the strange things you bring along-your messiness, your history, your contradictions, your kids, your dogs, your lover girl energy, and of course, your collection of bones and taxidermy.
View the published story, and explore more of my essays here.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
