Are you one of those individuals who reflects upon and attaches significance to nearly every event, sight, sound, and experience in your life? If so, then you and I are kindred spirits!
Roses are significant to me for many reasons gift-wrapped in memories: my mother’s garden, high school proms, a rosebud on the church altar for new born babies, and numerous gala occasions—especially our 50th wedding anniversary.
Most recently, roses represent many dimensions of the huge transition which Joe and I have made in the last year. A year ago last June, we bought our Southern Wisconsin home without any prior planning. The sudden purchase was motivated by our realization that we needed to be in this area for different reasons—the main ones being health facilities and proximity to family.
On that June day in 2009, as I walked around the condo which would soon become our home, I wondered: “How will I be able to stand living in a community after nearly 30 years of country living in beautiful, wild places?”
An answer to my question was found in the little patio garden outside our future condo living room. Three plants—-a bleeding heart, a clump of chives, and a couple of very straggly rose bushes—were in evidence there, pushing up through that “beauty bark” which landscapers delight in stuffing between plants.
The elderly man who had owned and lived in the condo had died, and we were buying it from his family. I clipped a couple of roses from the forlorn, abandoned garden, and placed them on the dashboard of our van. We went back up north in late June, to prepare for our September 1st move. The arduous, seemingly endless challenge of packing our life into some 280 boxes is well documented on last summer’s blog entries. Yet weary as I was during those weeks, I was encouraged all summer by the sight of the roses drying on the sunny dashboard.
The crumbly relics of what wanted to be a garden went everywhere with us. It seemed like the dried roses were saying, “You are going to love your new home. There you will have a garden of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And there you will plant flowers and herbs as well!”
When we finally moved into our condo home, I placed the dried roses in a tiny Fenton hobnail cranberry glass vase. There they sit, on our buffet, reminding me of the summer of 2009.
Meanwhile, my current rose bush saga is known to you if you’ve read recent Northern Reflections. You know about the encounter with slugs. After planting dishes of beer around my gardens, and especially under the demolished rose bushes in our patio garden, I harvested at least 20 disgusting, bloated, beer-soaked and literally dead drunk slug bodies—and worked them into the ground as compost. I trimmed the bare-except-for-thorns rose bushes to the ground, and poured a gallon of water spiked with plant food over their “grave sites”.
After about a month, we observed God’s great miracle of new life from death. The rose bushes were springing up, thickly foliated with rich green leaves. Buds appeared, and now we have ROSES again—pictured below—healthier by far than last year’s motly assortment.
Some of these treasures are pictured above. I did not put them in water. They are sitting in the satin glass tumbler, waiting to dry out and join their forefunners on our buffet. Each summer I hope to add to my collection of dried patio garden beauties. while reflecting on the many layers of life lessons implicit in the parable of roses!
(The dried circle of roses on the blue bottle in the top photo is yet another rose memory. It’s my wrist corsage of white roses which I wore on August 7th, at our granddaughter Nicole’s wedding. )
Margaret L. Been, ©2010
P. S. For a glimpse of our “English Garden” in August, see http://northernview.wordpress.com/ . You won’t be able to spot the roses because they are hunkered in among towering perennials and a lot of herbs But the roses are thriving there as pictured above in all their glory.
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Northern Reflections--glimpses of gold by Margaret L. Been 
