Roses

As symbolism for love and everything it entails, roses are the top of the line. I’m not sure where it all started or if it will ever end, but giving someone roses has always meant something. Whether you’re hurting, happy or receiving them for no reason at all, getting handed a rose is considered an international cure-all. Pretty interesting that we’ve all accepted this as fact.

In my backyard, there’s a rosebush. At the beginning of summer, it bloomed and provided a great number of flowers for me to do whatever I chose. I’ve never considered myself a green thumb, nor will I probably ever be considered that, but for some reason I took an immediate liking to these flowers. Below is a picture of the bush in full bloom.

So, yeah. A great thing to look at when you walk out on the back porch and I never once complained about that. I viewed them often, gave several away, but for the most part just left them as they grew. But a few weeks after the photo was taken, the flowers began to die, and I was left with nothing more than a bush. See below.

Already having stated that I’m not a green thumb, the extinction of my beautiful flowers came as a sort of bummer. I kept wondering if they had been improperly taken care of–even going to the lengths to ask my grandmother if there was something I could do. Never one to sugarcoat things, she put it quite frankly when she told me the flowers were dead. Better luck next year.

But the damn thing about roses is that while the flower itself may have lost its bloom, the bush is still there. Full of thorns and the last place you want to rest your head, it’s still there and capable of reproducing the things that make it so desirable in the first place. I read once that you should never be upset that the rose has thorns, but rather to be glad the thorn-bush decided to grow roses. This seems overwhelmingly true.

So armed with water and an undying desire to restore beauty to my backyard, tender loving care has been applied and continued, never settling for the idea that the flowers are just dead. The flowers are never just dead. Not until you let them die.

This morning I walked out on my back porch to see a sight for truly sore eyes. It seems as though the thorn-bush has decided that it’s not giving up on me, either, and one-by-one the flowers that I once adored are re-appearing.

I guess the point is that things grow, they blossom and eventually, like all things, they die. But giving up sure seems like a silly thing to do. Especially when you know the bush is still alive.