Anyone who wonders if there is hope for this world should look at a rose bush in Syracuse in March. You never saw anything looking more terminally, fatally and permanently dead, a brown black green thing with gnarly gray thorns hooking downward that taunt “go ahead and touch me, you deserve what you get”.
My friends Pat and Whitney Mills came to my house for lunch today. Their drive from Skaneateles took them past the Rose Garden at Thornden Park and it was all Whitney could do not to cancel the lunch and just spend the cold afternoon there. In fact, had Pat not grasped the wheel, I think Whitney would still be there in the dark.
To Pat and Whitney, those treacherous sticks hold the wonder of a new season of bloom and all it’s possibilities. They know with just a few more sunny days, they’ll see what no one driving by can see; red-tipped green buds no bigger than the very tip of a pencil protruding everywhere from the stems. The buds will become tender branches, the branches will hold clusters of color, all in just three month’s time. Today they look as much like roses as I look like Barack Obama, but the Mills can see where it’s all going.
Roses find it tough going in our climate. I experimented with the hobby years ago when my yard had lots of sun. But now I live in the shade of oak trees so I make use of the acidic leaves and grow rhododendrens, which themselves are challenging enough. The enemies of roses, like powdery mildew and Japanese beetles and aphids, are much happier in this environment than the flowers, so anyone who can produce a crop of roses in Skaneateles like Whitney, is as impressive to me as someone who can do math, which is big.
Throughout the summer Whitney places collections of his roses in bud vases on the kitchen table and countertops. It’s still life worthy of an oil painting. But rather than paint them, Whitney enters them in contests at the New York State Fair and is bashful about revealing he’s won more than one-hundred ribbons of various colors and roughly sixteen Queen of Court awards, the pinnacle of rose competition.
In all our conversations about roses there was only one piece of information I shared with Whitney that he didn’t already know. Years ago we were talking about the most fragrant roses and in listing several names, I mentioned the Chrysler Imperial, a burgundy red rose with an abundant, classic rose fragrance. People who like the scent of a Chrysler Imperial probably enjoy a glass of pinot noir, equally rich and red.
Perhaps it was one too many pinot noirs, but Whitney informed me a Chrysler Imperial is a car and not a rose. I knew that, but I was sure it was a rose too, or was I? Whitney’s encyclopedic knowledge of roses made me doubt my facts which could be scribbled in sum on a piece of paper. Torn in half. So we spent some time that evening going back to the Chrysler Imperial as a big joke on me. And guess what? Soon after, we learned the joke was on Whitney. I don’t recall if he looked it up or just stumbled upon the information, but he learned the Chrysler Imperial was a rose and now he grows it and we laugh about it every time we talk about roses, which is every time we see each other.
When you look outside and see skies the color of stainless steel, and the first blade of green grass rests stubbornly beneath the thatch, know that the clock is ticking on the roses. Pat and Whitney can see beauty among those thorns. There must be hope for every dark corner of the world.
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“…and the first blade of green grass rests stubbornly beneath the thatch, know that the clock is ticking on the roses.”
First of all, that is a beautiful line, in just the right place in the story.
And the reference to a ticking clock — the march of time; inevitable decay — made me recall my favorite Shakespeare sonnet. (I’m a sucker for the sonnets — I read them over every couple of years.)
“SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
It’s the memory of the roses, not the roses themselves, which symbolize hope to me. Roses aren’t with us most of the year. Knowing they’ll come back, that’s what gives us hope.
PS: Sonnets are here:
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/
Dave, we have that in common too. I love the sonnets and the 18th is my favorite. I have most of it memorized. To be compared in the teeniest, tiniest way to Shakespeare works for me! Did he ever write ” teeniest, tiniest” you think? And you have an Onion Open?? It belongs on youtube for all to enjoy! Or at least on my shelf of tapes. Let me know what I can do to get a copy, at your convenience. Thank you for your support Dave. It means so much.