The Bloom That Needed Nothing But Time

A wild tangle of thorny green climbs up the side of my stairwell. I’m not quite sure why I brought it here. Why I had faith that this barren rose might one day bloom. But I did. I pulled its deep root from my previous garden with the hopeful delusion of it wrapping lushly around two stories of metal trellis like a castle; one day bursting into crimson blooms with a change of soil, simply because I had willed it into being.

I’ve uprooted myself in much the same way. Repotting across continents. Dirt beneath my nails. Grazed by thorns. Tending to my garden with self-prophetic optimism. (Fertility restored but lost in the fallow.)

Months here moved on and nothing progressed. A horticulturalist took one look at its five leaf pattern and said the rose would never bloom. This was a rootstock sucker. The sturdy foundation to anchor a grafted rose. She overpowered herself, sending up shoots eager and relentless. This sucker knows how to stretch and reach for the sun but has forgotten how to open, how to soften, how to unfold beauty from a bud. This kind of strength was never meant to blossom.

And so I stopped nurturing her. No watering. No longer training stems to trellis. I stopped chasing off the hanuman as they plucked at her leaves. (One side nearly naked now where they’ve munched away on her foliage.) What I once believed in enough to carry with me from one home to another, had become a disappointment. This vine only scratched my skin and tore my dresses.

What good is a rose that doesn’t bloom?

At least a half a dozen times I’ve asked if we can hire a gardener to pull it down so I can put something more desirable in her place (she’s already choked out two other flowering vines). A few weeks ago, I almost did the deed myself. But I imagined the length of my arms scratched and bleeding and decided to wait a little longer. Then the gardener did come, but I was out that day so the extra task was not assigned.

And then early this morning, walking down from the rooftop after sitting in the predawn moonlight– there it was. A single bloom. Pale and soft and not much wider than my pinky finger. The most delicate, unassuming rose I’ve ever seen. I bent close, almost afraid to touch, as if some enchantment might fall away in pieces.

Through fruitless years and an abandonment of faith, she quietly endured. Perhaps waiting for circumstances I couldn’t predict. For a patience I didn’t have. For the smallest shift in light or water or air. Or maybe she only needed time.

Maybe I do, too.

(Maybe we all do.)