A stack of black buckets sits beside a large utility sink in the back of the shop. Nearby shelves are packed with old rags and other awesome ends. Lynsea Coy is the owner, the Coy to the Co. She's washing buckets in the sink.
"It's gotta be done. Bucket washing is a part of doing floristry and farm work. It's an essential part of it.You gotta have a clean vessel."
Coy & Co. isn't your average flower shop. There are no fresh flowers when you walk in. Long tables of dried flowers are the first things you see. They're packed full, little mason jars of flower heads are tucked between bushels of dried long stems. It smells earthy like sweet musk and herbs.
"That's one of the things we hear the most when people walk in is like, they'll say, it smells so good in here," Coy said. "My response is usually like. Oh, good. I'm happy to hear that. 'cause at this point, I'm basically nose blind to it. But when I'm out of town for a few days and I come back, I always walk in like, yep, this is, this is my spot. This is home."
All the fresh flowers are in the back, stored in a refrigerator that Lynsea made herself with a little help from friends. It's a common theme here at Coy & Co. Lynsea put in checkerboard marmoleum flooring -- biodegradable. She says she's never purchased a bucket.
Everything is reused. Bouquets are wrapped in paper.
"I've never thrown away a bucket. Even our buckets that like maybe get cracks in them or something, I just use for dried flowers and they get marked with purple tape, but black plastic is really, really, really bad for the environment. Maybe I'll just be buried with them." Coy said.
The shop is seven years in the making. Lynsea began selling her flowers at a stand outside of a friend's restaurant in her early twenties. She spent her youth homeless here in Portland and lost her financial aid for college. She was on her own, needed to make a living, so she got together with some fellow artisans at the beginning.
They shared rent for the back part of what is now the Coy & Co. storefront. Now at 29, she rents the entire store herself.
"Once you've kind of hit the bottom of the barrel, once you've lost everything, everything else is kind of a lot easier."
But this isn't the story Lynsea wants to tell.
"I think that my story could be really easily used to promote a, a false narrative of the American dream and bootstrapping it. Like, look a, a homeless, queer girl like, can do it. Why can't you? I was able to do it because of all of the barriers I didn't have," she said.
Coy is more interested in acknowledging her current privileges and using her resources to give back and foster an ethical relationship with the communityand the world. Her activism and business choices center those desires.
"Our main thing is that we're a sustainable florist. We sell a hundred percent locally grown flowers, no plastics, no dyes, no bleaches, no preservatives."
"I believe that when you create a business, you're creating a system. So a good friend of mine, Amber likes to say be a little harder on the system and a little softer on each other. And I think about that when I think about being a small business owner because you are creating a system that didn't exist before," Coy said.
"It's important to me that the systems that I'm creating are as sustainable as possible. So of course they should be intentional. I also believe that businesses should be responsible for the end life of anything that they bring into the world. So if you're creating, a shoe, you should be responsible for what happens to not just the shoe, but also the packaging that the shoe comes in, all that stuff, because the customer doesn't get to make that decision."
"Sure, you get to make a buying choice, but I think it's it's far, far more important that businesses are held accountable and taking responsibility for creating something that didn't exist previously."
That ethos extends to the posters in her shop window. Coy says she feels the need to be doubly loud because there's so much silence about Palestine from other businesses around her.
"Businesses have always been political spaces, they've always been arbiters of systems. We have some billionaires in power right now that are unelected. Businesses are political no matter what you say. If you choose to say nothing, that is still a political statement."
She quotes poets June Jordan and Angela Davis, saying Palestine is a moral litmus test of the world. Coy fundraises for a friend displaced from Gaza and points to a nonprofit called Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, a Florida-based organization that supports Palestinian refugees.
"I believed when I was first starting out that you could change things through the system that existed. I don't believe that anymore. I believe Baldwin, you can't change the system through the system, at least in my opinion, especially lately. Every day I am trying to figure out the why, because I do have to try and understand that. It's really difficult to live in this world. Every day I'm trying to figure out the answers to these questions. We're humans in the good and the bad way. We're just... we're humans."