Stopping to Smell the Roses

I have been receiving encouragement to post some of my short stories. Please know that none of them are directed at anyone in particular, but remember that it is true that all fiction has an element of truth. Some are going to be very personally inspired while others will be inspired by literature or music or the environment. Thank you for reading! 

Stopping to Smell the Roses

          I don’t remember exactly when I fell in love with roses. Their scent, the velvet feel of the petals, the startling pinch of the thorns, and the array of vivid colors. I know only that I have always felt I was one. A bud, struggling through storms and weeds and barbed wire to be free to blossom. It has been a recurring dream since I was little, this struggle to bloom. I awaken gasping for air, feeling the grass wrap its blades around the base of my throat trying to choke the very life out of me. Yes, I am a rose.

           Since I was little I have been considered pleasing, but odd. I remember as a child being complimented on my good manners and my ability to socialize with adults. I also remember adults who were overly affectionate with my “mature” state of being. They were weeds, choking my rose. I have always had many friends, but only a few I allow close enough to smell the rose. I was sealed up as petals in winter wrapped about a frozen infant flower.

           Somewhere deep within me I found roots that blossomed into laughter. I found humor was a gift that would gain me friendships and acceptance. I didn’t choose it, really. It was more that laughter found me. It gave me confidence to blossom into an extrovert who became addicted to people and helping them bloom. In high school I was less an oddity because I was a preacher’s kid than I was because I carried a violin to school every day. It wasn’t cool to be in Orchestra in those days, but in the sound of those strings I found a place I could grow. A rose can sing through the strings of a wooden instrument. It was during this time of my life that my folks discovered that I was a rose of a different color. Being unable to contain my brilliance, they sent me away to live my grandmother in the wilderness.

           Living with my grandmother, I learned to embrace the wild. I grew, a thorny flower, fighting the weeds and barbed wire, the choking grass and the stony ground to become my own version of a rose in state of bloom.

           My grandmother revealed to me secrets from my family history that most were trying to hide under lush lawns. Family trees were growing into places that no one was willing to climb, but all hid behind. It was a game of hide and seek with my family, they hiding, and me seeking. Gratefully, my grandmother was willing to take my exploratory soul to the prairie where she helped me find myself. I somehow learned there to love people while being very intolerant of them. A juxtaposition of purpose suddenly consumed me. I discovered that I loved the earth, and the things that grew there. The stones left unturned, I enjoyed turning. I became a wild child, not the kind of disobedient and rebellious wild that make a child bad, but the wild that forces a rose to grow out of the mess the earth tries to cover it with.

          We lived in a cabin without electricity or running water. We drew water from a pump outdoors. Our clothes were washed in a wringer washer that we filled from buckets at the pump a good 30 feet away. We went up the mountain to cut down trees, and then we chopped wood. We cooked our meals on a wood burning stove, and lit our rooms with candlelight and kerosene lanterns. We lived 20 miles from the nearest town, and 40 from any town that had significant population (750 people at the time). We read. By firelight and candlelight. We immersed ourselves in the beautiful world of words. And I loved living this way.

           Going back home for high school was challenging, although not an unwelcome challenge. I had been practicing my violin on that prairie for three hours every day, and my opportunity to play in a symphony was real and tangible and gave me a sense of purpose. But life at home was difficult. My folks misinterpreted my wild for bad. The Christian family model my parents were trying to uphold in a bouquet of white roses was being consistently challenged by this one red rose. On a prairie in Wyoming where I was to learn discipline, I had discovered myself and I no longer fit into the family vase. I had dug my roots in deeply, gotten myself dirty, and I kept growing. For my family, this was not a righteous thing, even if right.

            Out there on the Wyoming prairie, I connected with my grandmother, and she gave me Native American roots. She did not bestow this gift on everyone. From these, a rose had sprung. Grandma was a Christian, a strong woman of faith, but had reconciled it with a different heritage. She was keenly aware of what it meant to find God in the earth. Coupled with pouring over written words by candlelight, she introduced me to Henry David Thoreau. I took his deep thoughts of nature with me to high school. While he has not so much inspired my writing style, he did inspire my connection with the ground. He realized that people were people, and they had lost their grasp on the great satisfaction of becoming a simple settler. He understood. I knew it was going to be unacceptable to read something other than the King James Bible at home, especially something so transcending as Thoreau. But something incredible was happening to me. Thoreau’s words were inspiring spirit and life. Thoreau was helping me think. Thoreau was helping me bloom.

           I was an environmentalist before my time. I am now affectionately referred to, yet in a somewhat mocking way, by some in my family as a “tree-hugger.” You see, after watching my grandmother befriend a family of skunks living under our porch at the cabin, but also seeing her shoot the rabbit we had for dinner, I had developed a respect for the ground we walked on.

          I grew weary of how people treated one another. I tired of the accusing finger pointing at environmentalists that just wanted the earth to stay healthy. I rebelled at politics and religion, but I would not accept that this made me “bad.”  For a while, "the right thing" had won the battle, and I laid aside my dreams of being a peacemaker, of ending world hunger, of creating equality for all breathing things, of being a musician inspired by the physical world. All these, the things I thought God cared about, were weeds, and grass, and barbed wire strangling the rose. Until now.

         I have discovered that the battle is but a portion of war, and the war is far from over. It is a heavy fight, burdened by generations of experience at losing. But I’ve taken ahold of the firm handle on a machete. It is a weapon freeing the spirit of a young girl who was being choked by the world’s expectations of her. Chopping away choking vines of opposing forces is exhausting, but it is allowing me moments to stop and smell the roses, while freeing the one captured in an untended garden. And she will be free. And she will bloom.