thorned

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet...

(excerpted from Romeo and Juliet by william shakespeare)

a number of years ago, for mother's day, i decided to buy myself roses, rose bushes that is. my house was still fairly new and there was a sunny side of the house just begging for shrubs. i chose a hedge rose that would fill in and provide sprays of blooms to support my arranging habit. i planted five young roses and left them largely to their own devices.

the side of the house they were on is one that i don't see often, but when the meter reader or the cable guy came i'd be forced to take a critical look at them as they fought back the thorns. somehow, although these roses hadn't bloomed with much vigor at all, they had still multiplied and produced long spindly branches of saber tooth resembling thorns.

i'd look at the bushes with a bit of disdain and then set that emotion aside in favor of hope. i felt certain that eventually they would produce flowers and all my dreams of a wall of color and fragrance would be realized. and so i'd accept the scratches; wear long pants and sleeves, protecting myself the best i could; and wait patiently.

today i did the only thing i loathe about spring. i closed the windows and turned on the a/c. but then - nothing happened. the downstairs unit did not come on when i asked it to. so i marched out to the air conditioning units on the sunny side of the house imagining something as simple as an unplugged cord or a big arrow pointing out the problem.

unfortunately, the a/c unit that wasn't working was encased in a wall of thorny shrubbery. pruners in hand, i decided there was no better time than the present to free it from its chains. (still hopeful the briars were perhaps the culprit, if i'm being honest.) as i pulled out vine after vine of spiked greenery, i noticed that my rose bushes were buried under thorned weeds. razor sharp thorned weeds.

my hands bleeding in several places it occurred to me that the sunny side of the house parallelled my past relationships in a way. the roses i'd planted around my utilities were a relatively unthorned variety. a little sticky on the stems, but rather benign compared to the weeds that were dangerously armed with small daggers.

all this time, i'd been rolling down my sleeves and wearing gloves to protect myself from the weeds. and waiting for roses from the wrong plants.

d: roses, freed of the suffocating vines, to bloom and thrive
b: the yard looks great! mowed, weeded, ready for planting!
g: a love of flowers and gardening given to me by my mom...