One Pink Rose

About two years after we moved into this house, I planted three rose bushes out in the backyard. Two of them didn't last more than a year, and they never bloomed. The third rose bush survived the summer heat, but it never bloomed.

Every year, that one surviving rose bush would get hundreds of bright green leaves, but there wasn't a bud in sight. Until this afternoon....... not only a bud, but a real live blooming rose. I saw it from my kitchen window as I was watching a squirrel hang upside-down from the bird feeder. I thought I was seeing things....... could that really be a pink rose out there?

I went out for a closer look, and there it was... one beautiful, blooming, "Pink Dawn" rose, with its petals lifting up towards the sun. I was going to leave that rose right where it was, but we were supposed to get rainstorms and hail tonight. (Which hasn't happened.... but the night is young.)

I came back into the house to get the scissors, and I cut the rose from the bush and put it in a vase. One perfect rose.... and it took eight years to bloom. How could I leave it out there to face the "heavy rains and damaging hail" that the weatherman predicted?

That "Pink Dawn" rose bush is supposed to be a climber. When I planted the three bushes in the yard, I had visions of pale pink roses blooming all over the wood fence going along the back of the yard. This one little rose bush that has survived all these years hasn't grown enough to bloom all over the fence on a bird-house, much less the fence surrounding our backyard.

But on the bright side, it hasn't shriveled up and turned brown and died. It has hung in there, through one hot summer after another, since 1998. And on this day, I have one beautiful, perfect, pale pink rose in a crystal vase.

It was worth the wait.