The lily has a smooth stalk,
Will never hurt your hand;
But the rose upon her brier
Is lady of the land.
There’s sweetness in an apple tree,
And profit in the corn;
But lady of all beauty
Is a rose upon a thorn.
When with moss and honey
She tips her bending brier,
And half unfolds her glowing heart,
She sets the world on fire.
The Rose, Christina Rossetti
I’d like to tell you about the time I took my dead grandma on our second date. Take you back to the place where my two worlds collided: one as old as a marble headstone in a hometown cemetery, the other just taking root.
The trouble is I’m afraid it won’t land unless I let you in on just what my Grandma meant to me. And I don’t really know how to do that for the woman whose eyes lit up whenever I walked into the room, even, and especially, when I was up to no good.
I wish I could tell you the unspoken secret she and I passed in the silence between shared simpers. The better part of it remains a mystery to me. But after all those years sitting with Grandma, I’ve learned that storytelling can be a love letter, too.
We called her Sweet Marie, even though Grandma was anything but sweet. She was a hundred pounds soaking wet, a tough-as-nails redhead who ran on a slow drip of black coffee, bacon grease and cigarettes. But I know she loved me because she let me soften her, sweet. She didn’t say much aside from swear words, but I’ll have you know, everything she touched turned up roses.
Grandma’s rose garden—its blooms and thorns—formed the formidable backdrop of my restless childhood. Countless, interwoven bushes formed a hedge that lined the stockade fence built by grandpa that became the border of my wonderland. Inside this walled garden the nagging question I carried like a thorn in my flesh of whether I belonged, faded like its deep green leaves in the fall and revealed my stalky rootedness to this place.
Year after year Grandma’s birthday beckoned spring to pull her golden cloak over our corner of the world, thawing grandma’s hardened sensibilities, and forcing her tender blooms. Following a winter of enduring thorns, we were held together in a bursting kaleidoscope of velvet reds, lurid pinks and sun-kissed corals punctuated by creamy whites and butter yellows.
She’d stop and stare, a hand on the elastic waistband of her pinstriped Levi’s, the other shielding the mid-day sun from her eyes. When she slipped behind the woodshed and out of sight, I’d run over from my rusty red trike to catch the tail end of a smoke trail from a just-snuffed Winston. Knee-high in an eyelet sundress with grandma’s brush rollers pinned in my hair, I stretched my sights toward her, squinting from the sun forming a halo around her red curls, and watched the warm shine come back over her eyes.
Grandma looked at roses the way she looked at me. For all our trying, we never can see our own face firsthand. I’d stop and stare, too. At grandma, at the colorful faces of those blooms, and back at her. Squinting, straining to see what it was that she saw. In the roses, and in me.