Tina Simpson graduated from Herrin High School in 1973 and went straight to John A. Logan College for cosmetology. She became a beautician and worked in several shops. She didn't know it then, but that foundation — aesthetics, design, the eye for what makes something beautiful — would eventually lead somewhere she hadn't anticipated.

"It makes you become artistic," she said. "And that helped me become the floral designer that I am."

Her husband Jim is from Marion. He'd started in the floral business at sixteen through the CVE vocational program at Marion High School, delivering flowers for Fox Flowers. The employers saw something in him quickly and began training him to design. He spent years in that world before pivoting to manufacturing: sixteen years at a Mount Vernon company that made personnel transporters for underground coal mines.

When the coal industry began declining, Jim called Tina one day and told her they were going to open a flower shop.

"I said, what?"

He'd been doing it since he was sixteen, he told her. He thought they could do it. She trusted him.

In 1988, they opened Les Marie Florist — named by combining the first halves of their daughters' names, Lesleigh and Mariessa. Only after opening did they learn, from a writer doing an article on them for a tourism publication, that les Marie in French roughly translates to "the married couple." For a business that would build much of its reputation on weddings, the coincidence felt almost designed.

When they opened, there were already six other flower shops in Herrin. They were number seven. Everyone thought they were crazy.

"We will be number one," Tina said. "And we are."

Nearly four decades later, the business is still built the way it was on day one: from the ground up. No pre-made arrangements. Every design begins with an empty container and a vision. The two of them, both now seventy years old, work seven days a week. The morning of this interview, they had been at the Riggin-Pillatsch and Burke funeral home at seven for a family service, drove back to the shop, and had the summer window installed in an hour.

They were recently honored as Corporate Honorees at HerrinFesta Italiana — a celebration that included riding in the parade, parties, and recognition from the community they've served for nearly four decades.

"A lot of our peers are retired," Tina said. "But we own it, and we love what we do every day."

Their daughters were raised in Herrin, and both graduated from Herrin High School. Leslie graduated with high honors and won the SIU alumni scholarship, which paid for her degree. She's now a funeral director with her own funeral home in Lincoln, Illinois. Marisa attended John A. Logan's Dental Hygiene School and graduated with the Golden Scaler Award — top student in her class. She's now a dental hygienist; her husband is an architect in Herrin. Between the two daughters, the family has three grandchildren: Leslie's daughter Peyton, twenty-one, and studying radiological therapy in Joliet; and Marisa's sons Griffin and Grant, both at Herrin Elementary with straight A's, both playing sports and music, Griffin writing poems and books and attending Smart Camp at SIU, Grant working on piano.

Tina's roots in Herrin run deep. Her father grew up there through the turbulent years of Williamson County history — he remembered walking past the KKK in a cemetery near his home, and he told Tina those stories as a child. Her family included schoolteachers in Herrin. Her mother raised Tina and her sister there, never leaving the area. When Tina and Jim eventually moved away to Mount Vernon for his work, the pull of home remained.

They came back.

When asked what she'd tell her younger self — maybe her eighth or ninth grade self — she doesn't reach for anything complicated.

"Be yourself," she said. "Don't become what others expect of you. Be you."

And then the rest of it: "Stay true to who you are. Keep God and your family close. Keep your morals. You will be fine."

Nearly four decades of building something beautiful, one arrangement at a time, suggests she was right.