Giving the Roses a Run For

On those days when there is no snow or rain, when the temperature is somewhere above shivering and just below overheating, when there's no other chore that appeals to me, I go into the garden with my holey gloves and my rusted clippers, and I take on the rugosa roses. The attention they require is what keeps me from having a flower bed like the ones in the gardening books. The ill-mannered, unshapely, thorny sticks, with runners that grab hold and tangle themselves just beneath the soil are what prevents me from planting the crepe-petaled poppies of June, the un-fussy coreopsis of July, the Russian sage that apparently anyone can grow without trouble, all because I am caught in a timeless battle with barbed, overgrown shrub things, planted before I lived here, that save themselves from slaughter with their yearly bloom. Like babies with colic, just when you think you can't take it anymore, they smile.

In April I am not swayed by the promise of their vibrant appearance. Instead, this is my time to catch them, when they are not yet awake.  I pull dead leaves away from where they've matted themselves in a circle around each plant. I yank at the stubborn orange bittersweet vines that add to the snarl by slithering up each thorny spike of rose and cement their roots to the ground below. I inspect each cluster of growth to see if it is worthy of calling itself a shrub. I push down the relics that try to get away with another year by staying upright even though they're dead. I push them until they snap.  

Then June comes and oh, the lovely roses. The pink. The abundance. The fragrance. I take pleasure in watching my neighbors stroll by them, commenting on their beauty.  I put plastic bags on metal dowels in their midst to catch and kill the beetles that force them to lose their petals too soon. I am like every Disney headmistress, stepmother and queen, showing off the beauty of the captive innocents to the unsuspecting public, then belittling and abusing them when we are alone.

In July, we are alone. I think against saving the rose hips for jelly and behead them before their time. I decide there is no need for the roses, now in their setting days, to stretch the length of the perennial bed. So I am back with my clippers. I yank them out by their runners.  I fill and refill the wheelbarrow with their remains.  I visit the greenhouses and buy myself a container of something else. Something I will have forgotten I've planted by the time next April comes, when I am back outside, my dog nearby, leash staked into the ground, running after squirrels within the limits of her restraint.

Spring

It's the sounds I've missed,
The trill of frogs from the pond,
The wild conference of birds mismatched, singing over one another
all at once,
The sound wind makes when it has leaves to blow,
the snow transformed into drops, warm enough to be rain again.

And the smells.
Winter has none.
Spring smells.
The salt of the ocean,
the stink of the hidden earth,
under leaves left.
It smells like spring, she'd say,
when I thought she was too small to know
seasons had smell.

And the slop of my steps
on the now bare wet ground,
and the tools uncovered from last fall
waiting in my garden,
and the empty pots
tipped over drunk in the yard,
waiting for new plants to tend.

And the colors,
the vivid greenness
sharp enough
to pierce through the brown leaves left to protect them.
Here I am!
And the peek-a-boo yellow of a bud,
And the warmth of blue,
and the calm of the day ending,
and the pile of snow
each day smaller,
defeated.

What was the cold?
What was it to be inside
with chapped fingers
and dusty houseplants
and narrow pathways shoveled
to the woodpile?
With only a window to watch
the birds sort through the box
of seeds I'd left them.

Frogs
have come from the murky depth,
ospreys circle overhead
and dive into the brilliant water.
There was never winter.
Just a distraction.
For this.