Root

R went to buy some dirt for her rose this morning. It arrived in the form of a root packaged in a large box which she ordered from Texas. It seemed to go on a roundabout route for a number of days before getting here. The root looked wizened and old. She took it into the bathroom and washed it off and placed in a large white bucket to soak in some water. Then she got in the car and took off for a gardening center and returned about an hour later with two big bags of potting mix. I helped her move the big royal blue pot onto a small framework of little wheels so that it would be raised enough from the ground to allow water to drain and so that it could be occasionally be moved as needed. The bags of dirt were amazingly heavy. I went back inside and R scooped potting mix out of the bag and into the pot and planted her root, which had three small branches. She added some seaweed extract which makes an excellent fertilizer. The Vikings, R tells me, put it on their fields of barley. Roses – according to fossil evidence – are 35 million years old. The War of Roses were a series of civil wars fought in England from the mid-to-late fifteenth century and had very little to do with roses and everything to do with seizing power and seeking revenge. The Juliet Rose, which cost 3 million English pounds to develop, is described as having “voluminous petals, that ombré beautifully from soft peach to warm apricot. She has a light scent with a hint of tea and can take up to two days to fully open.” Later, R and I ate hot dogs and baked beans and watched an episode of Columbo dating from 1971. Somebody should develop a Columbo Rose. I see it in a trench coat chomping a cigar. Do you think of roses as pleasantries or symbols of romance? I think roses are dreams of fragrance scooped out of heaven. I think of feeding spoonfuls of air to the pathos of speaking and crawling into its shade. The muses love dissonance. The arms have tendency to lift things. The hands have a tendency to hold things. The fingers have a tendency to write things. The voice has a tendency to say things. Parlor my Apollinaire and copperplate my letters. There are bumps along the way expressed in springs. It would be a lot more effective if I broke this paragraph in half, but this isn’t about efficiency, this is about the long slow growth of roses, and all the diversions along the way.