I haven't been posting as much lately, because I've been working on a project that I started awhile ago. It's a book about how to write your own wedding ceremony. When I started it I lived in the house in the photograph above, and I worked at a desk that was pushed right up to that window with shutters by the porch. That desk and I, we have some history, and it includes the moment that I realized I was not prepared to finish the project I started. I posted about what that was like for me here. It was a hard time.
Even though I wasn't in the best place at that moment in my life, I had the good sense to plant a few rose bushes. Looking back, gardening was one of a few decent choices I made, along with learning how to sit still and breathe and deciding to trust my new husband. The three activities have offered dividends beyond what I could possibly have imagined when I started them. As for the roses, the are in a terrible, not sunny enough place for rose bushes, and they have received minimum care over the last fourteen years. I honestly did not have a lot of hope they would survive.
But it just so happens that this school year, my youngest daughter goes to school just two blocks from this house. I pass it often, and have wondered daily at the fact that the roses have made it this many years. I have spent the year watching their cycle, and like clockwork, they continue to do what roses do. They bud and bloom and fall away. It brings me great comfort to see them in a healthy rhythm that was started when I felt so unsteady.
On my end, it has taken me awhile, but I'm completing the project I started when I planted them, and it seems almost too synchronized to believe that I would complete the project when these roses are in bloom. But that is how it is going to happen. It feels very sweet.
I hope you all are enjoying May with its usual madness (someone just said to me, "Well you know, May is a lot like December." What a bizarre, and true, and unfortunate tangle we've made for ourselves!). And that you have your own reasons to appreciate its blooming.
Love,
Cristina
