By Summer Lewis
PROMPT — What is Love?
I used to own 40 rose bushes.
They came with an old house my new husband and I bought in Boise, Idaho — when we were young, in love, and wanting to settle down and start a family.
The roses were a riotous mix of colors and shades, lined up prettily against a low weathered gray fence in the sunny courtyard of our new backyard.
The windows from the kitchen, eating area, and sun-room looked out at them. They were in constant view, and my responsibility for them could not easily be ignored.
I preferred to grow vegetables back then. The roses intimidated me with their elegance and fragility. Not at all like a melon or head of lettuce in usefulness. Still, they had been growing at this house for a long time, and someone, or a succession of someones, had cultivated and loved them.
I was learning to honor love and ready for new responsibilities. Now that their care had passed to me, I did not want them to die on my watch.
I diligently studied rose cultivation with books borrowed from the Boise library (These were the days before Google!). I learned to mound loose acidic bark at the base of each bush and put in soaker hoses to keep their shallow roots cool and damp through the hot Idaho summers. I fertilized them, vigilantly watched for disease, picked off aphids, and clipped spent blooms.
That first fall, instructions in one hand, sharp new clippers in the other, I pruned them rather far back – reducing them to ugly gnarly stumps. I had a few winter months of worry that I had killed them. But no, they were consistently resilient and reliable, dying back each fall and blossoming beautifully each spring.
The roses came to be a source of pride and joy for me. I needed something alive to cherish and nurture, so I showered them with the love I was unable to give the baby we longed for, but could not conceive.
Now, nearing 70 years old, and with summer on its way, I am reminded of my roses and those heady glory days when opening to new love was easy and untainted by its potential for crushing loss.
I do a bit of grieving even now, more poignant than sad, for this long-lost past.
I know that some years later, after we had moved, that beautiful house and its 40 rosebushes burned to the ground — just like my life did, or so I thought, for several years after our divorce.
There are things you cannot know about life, with its relentless cycles and imperatives until you have been burned to the ground and survived a dark cold season — only to find yourself born anew again.
There are things you cannot know about love until you have loved and lost -- only to find that love does return, in one guise or another, again and again -- with the reliability and resilience of the roses, I cherished so long ago.
Artist Summer Lewis uses visual art, writing and poetry co-creatively to accomplish one thing – to tell a good and true story. She was a digital pioneer, launching a social media marketing business in 2008. In 2012, she began a 7 year “walkabout” of Oregon, working remotely and blogging from the road. She lives and creates in Ashland, Oregon.
Comments