I was actually a very creative kid when I was little. I would run around my backyard with my dolls or little toy pigs and then play in the gardens we had there. Our backyard wasn’t that big, but it was huge for me at the time. We had a small orchard that gave us nectarines, apricots, plums, peaches, cherries, apples, almonds, oranges, and grapefruit. Not a lot, mind you, but for a little kid, it was fantastic.
My tree was the peach tree, since the peaches were usually ripe in early June, which is near my birthday. The peaches weren’t big, but they fit my hand snugly at the time. I would eat them whenever I could, sticky juices running down my arms and onto my shirt. It was paradise.
But our garden wasn’t just fruit trees. There were wild patches of dirt that were nearly always covered in grass, either green in the spring or golden anytime else. We had planted other things, such as tomatoes and roses, but they would eventually be choked by the grass.
I never knew a time where we didn’t have roses. They too, like everything, were covered in grass, but they were special to me, and I would spend extra time tending them, picking off the aphids, and just trimming them so that more roses would bloom. I always did like roses, after all, I am the namesake of my Grandma Rose.
Whenever Grandma Rose came over, I would try to talk to her at least once, one on one. And she would sit back and, with a dreamy look in her eyes, and she would tell me the first time she met me. She was in the hospital, after my brother and I were born, and she was searching for me. Then, when she was looking at some of the other babies, she noticed a particularly pretty one. She asked a nurse who was that baby, and then the nurse gave her my name. My name, which, in a way, was her name.
I always loved that story, and because we shared names, I thought some pretty weird things when I was a kid. One of the strangest of these thoughts was that, because my name was Rose, I would be able to touch thorns… without getting hurt!
This, I learned, was absolutely false. I frequently got scratches on my arms, little tiny droplets of blood accompanying it. Yet, I would never stop attending the roses, because they were special. When I was away once, I remember my dad mailing me and mentioning in his letter that the roses were blooming better than ever.
I used to collect the little rose petals, drying them out and trying to preserve the sweet smell. Then I would gather them in a little bag and keep them with me, in a little treasure box. I always did like rose potpourri, because even when the rose wilted away, the smell would remain for much longer.
And I like roses.
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