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I was sim-ply trying to add this im-age as my G-mail signa ture, hon-est! And, as it so often does,my building frustration morphed itself into creative solution-making attempts and somehow landed here in the shape of yet another blog post . . .
I suppose I should tell the rest of the story--at least the public version--while I'm here . . .
That this photo exists is nothing sort of miraculous, in my opinion. Years and years and a lifetime ago, when I was without a home (a rented condo, even one with a lake view, is not a home in my opinion), I bought three roses. These were to be my front-steps-planters garden, faithful greeters of my weary soul after too-long, too-weary days of trying to sort out who I was and how to make my way to someday. . .
The first of these was Peace. And Peace was the first to succumb to the overabundance of shade and tree roots in her new garden home in the haven I now call home. I've replaced her . . . maybe three times? The only Peace rose that has survived me, though, is the lovely cross-stitched blossom my mother gifted me with one Christmas. A beautifully symbolic gift, given its history and hers and ours . . .So Peace now graces one wall of my dining room, blooming eternally where family comes together in those blessedly peaceful days between Christmas and New Years . . .
The second rose was Brigadoon. I must admit that the name entranced me, bringing back fond memories of a movie of that name and of the friend I shared it with that long-ago college evening . . . But I have since come to admire Brigadoon most for her courage to survive, to gift me with a single bloom each spring, each bloom more glorious than the last, as if she knows it will be her last. For most of her life she has been a single stem, significantly eaten away at its base the last several of those years. Brigadoon bloomed for me this spring . . . as the trees above her were leafing out.
But Pristine, the third of these long-ago roses, did not . . . And I thought, in the throes of midsummer's challenges, that she had moved on before I could let go of that elusive . . . hope? . . . that her survival represented. So I let go, drifted, moved on, moved on again, lived as I was meant to live . . . I thought.
One bearably warm late August afternoon, I retreated with mountains of schoolwork to the back porch hammock swing. Not sure how long I rocked and read before . . . I saw . . . her perennial, her pristinely beautiful gift to me . . .
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