Yesterday I was walking on the beach with Beth, and our now two dogs. There were four, but we buried first Pearl and then Lucy this year. It is also fall, suddenly it seems, the time of the year when things die, and we fill the shed with firewood for the one thing we don’t need a poll to determine: winter will come. It’s kind of a homesick season for me, there is a sadness in the end of summer, but also a relief. There is an abundance too, fish in the freezer and pantry, soon meat ( moose season begins next Sunday) and the roses do this very strange and wonderful thing: they bloom again, like spring. Randomly, a few delicate pink blossoms in between the browning leaves and red ripe rose hips, there are flowers. Little ones. The color, the prettiness, catch me by surprise. I don’t know what this means, this late bloom, but they make me happy. Very. I look for them now.
We bumped into two friends and a bouncy young terrier, and they. commented on the roses too– and I said you have to read Mary Oliver’s poem, the one about the roses, and they did not know it, so I sent it to them this morning, and realized I should send it to you too– It’s in her book Felicity.
Roses
By Mary Oliver
Everyone now and again wonders
about
those questions that have no ready
answers : first cause, God’s existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing,
not going to the mall, not the Super
Bowl.
“Wild roses,” I said to them one
morning.
“Do you have the answers ? And if you
do,
would you tell me?”
The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”
they said. “ But as you can see, we are
Just now entirely busy being roses.”
