‘Flower cousins’ share passion for design at family shop
Pair committed to taking care of their customers in the way they always have.
When it comes to fresh flowers, opinions are mixed. There are some who believe they are pointless because they will eventually wither and die — and others who appreciate their beauty and are devoted to sharing them with the world.
Mindi Hixson of Troy has been around the flower business all her life. Her uncle and aunt, Mark Casto and Kim Hampshire, owned Genell’s Flowers in Piqua since 1982, after purchasing it from the original owner Genell Horner.
“As a little girl, I remember coming to the shop and my Aunt Kim would let me pick a flower out of the cooler,” Hixson said. “It always felt so magical being there.”
As Hixson grew, her love for flowers did also. Even after going to college at Wright State and then Ohio State University, where she earned her degree in communications in 2001, Hixson said she always found time to work at her family’s little flower shop.
“I moved to Indiana and then to Williamsburg, Virginia,” Hixson said. “I worked as a financial planner and in employee benefits.”
But Hixson said she always knew she wanted to go into some type of community service. She got married and had a daughter and decided to stay home with her while she was small. Eventually, the family returned to Miami County and Hixson started working at Standard Register in Dayton.
“It was a rough time in my life,” Hixson said. “I lost one of my close friends in 2016 and Standard Register filed for bankruptcy.”
At that time, Hixson’s cousin, Casey Virgallito, had taken over running Genell’s Flowers. Hixson talked to Virgallito about working with her in the shop.
“My heart was always with flowers,” Hixson said. “But financially I was focused on my career in human resources so I could help take care of my family.”
In 2020, everything changed with the worldwide pandemic causing a shutdown and resulting in the loss of many people to the COVID-19 virus.
“So much happened and I realized how short life is,” Hixson said. “I needed to get back to where my heart has always been — with flowers.”
Hixon and her cousin started talking about what the family flower shop needed, and Virgallito asked Hixson if she’d be interested in becoming part owner of Genell’s.
“It sounded like my dream was coming true,” Hixson said. “We became official partners on January 1 of this year.”
Virgallito took over ownership of Genell’s about 10 years ago, after she finished college. She earned a bachelor’s degree in finance and has a PHD in economics. But the pull to work in the family flower shop was strong.
“I had no intention of doing this initially,” Virgallito said. “I wanted to find my own path.”
But no matter where she worked or what she did, Virgallito said she missed interacting with customers. And she missed the flowers. In 2021, she officially purchased the business from her mom, who wanted to retire from full-time work.
about anymore. Some of it was grappling with all of this after losing a parent or a grandparent or a friend — to COVID-19 or another illness or circumstance that felt, like a lot of life, utterly and completely out of their control.
So it’s fitting, maybe, that getting into college this year is also a hot mess.
“As this year’s college-admissions season nears its close, with decisions arriving from schools this month, it is already shaping up as the craziest ever,” Jeffrey Selingo, author of “Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions,” writes in New York magazine. “Applications to the 1,000-plus colleges that are part of the Common Application are up 6% over last year’s total, which was already a record.”
Selective schools have become even more selective, Seligo writes, and less selective schools have started deferring or denying students when they sense they’re being used as backup plans.
Throw in the botched rollout of the revamped FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid, although I’m sure one of those Fs should stand for something else) and you’ve got a perfect storm. Of anxiety, mostly.
“A series of blunders — from a haphazard rollout to technical meltdowns — have left students and schools in limbo and plunged the most critical stage of the college admissions season into disarray,” the New York Times reports about FAFSA. Whee!
“In a normal year,” the New York Times continues, “students would be sorting through their financial aid offers by now, giving them plenty of time to prepare for the traditional decision day on May 1, when many schools expect commitments.”
Not this year.
Some schools (but not all of them!) are pushing back enrollment deadlines to accommodate the delays, which throws another monkey wrench into the system, as families try to navigate dorm assignments and wait lists and budgets and ... joy? Pride? Exhilaration? Any room for those anymore?
“Talk with American high school seniors who plan on an undergraduate education and you’ll find a consistent range of emotions: anxiety, confusion, shock,” Seligo writes. “College presidents say they’re worried about student mental health on campuses, but they’ve also been responsible for policies that make the application process more stressful and confusing than it has ever been before.”
I asked my pal John Duffy, a family therapist who specializes in adolescent anxiety, if kids feel like talking about any of it.
“Mostly,” he said, “seniors want to be engaged in any other conversation besides that.”
There are exceptions, of course. But mostly, Duffy said, he steers clear of college when he’s talking to seniors he knows as clients or otherwise.
“I typically find myself asking some variation of the following,” he said. “What’s coming up that you’re looking forward to? Prom, graduation, Lolla? What do you want to make sure you do with your friends before graduation? Is there anything you’ll miss about high school?”
Anything, he said, to lighten — rather than add to — what is surely a heavy mental load.
“I would just encourage parents not to ignore college, but to talk about a lot of other things as well,” he said. “Music or Netflix shows or Tiktok videos. All of it eases the stress of talking about college.”
It also reminds them (and us) that they are so, so, so much more than a sum of their high school parts — their GPA, their test scores, their extracurriculars, their volunteer hours, their essays.
They are their triumphs and setbacks and friendships and inside jokes and birthday cakes and messes and fears and smiles and stories and singular, beautiful hearts. They are all of those things wherever they go to college, whether or not they even go to college. Whatever happens next, they’re all the things that have happened so far. And that’s a gift right there. And we can, and should, remind them what that means to us.
Because it actually means everything.