Monday Memories

I was out planting another rose bush this morning and thinking about roses and my mother. The two seem intertwined in my thoughts and memories. I never smell a rose without thinking about Mom and it's not often that I think about Mom without also thinking about roses.

Naturally, the rose was Mother's favorite flower. After she died, we had a discussion about what had been her favorite color rose but no one seemed to really know. I think she just took what she could get and called it good. She herself never raised roses (although my late, great mother-in-law did, and in the desert at that!) but she enjoyed it when people sent them to her. For my birthday every year, I sent her a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. Depending on how flush I was at the time, I'd send her 6 or 12 but I always sent her some with a thank-you note for having given birth to me.

The first birthday after she died was a hard one, for many reasons. Of course, you miss your mom when she passes on and then you realize that she's not going to call you on your birthday to wish you a happy day. (Actually, I used to call her at about the time I was born and say, "What were you doing on this day 'x' number of years ago?") Since my birthday is right around Father's Day, the pain of Mother's Day was still fresh and I just felt very out of sorts. Believe it or not, I really missed sending my mother roses on my birthday. That's when I got the idea that I'd buy myself a rose bush on my birthday, in her memory.

Now I am different than my mother in this respect. I'd rather have a rose bush, that will presumably be putting out roses for years, rather than a long-stemmed bouquet. So I set out to find a rose that would say "Mother" to me.

There are a lot of roses out there!

I went through various ones with significant names, then thought it might be cool to get a blue rose, since her favorite color was blue. In the end, I picked out two "Love" roses and a "Gemini" because I was running out of time to get them in the ground. The Love rose is self-explanatory, I think. The Gemini I picked because my siblings and I are all "Geminis", born in an 8-day period in June. Here are pictures of them (not in my garden, unfortunately):

Love on the left and Gemini on the right.

The rose I was planting this morning was a gift from a dear friend. We met in an online group years ago and have grown to be friends and "sisters" in a lovely sense of the word. The rose she sent me was "Sisters In Heart"...isn't that just perfect? Here's a picture of that rose (again, not my own):

A few years ago for Mother's Day, Friend Husband gave me a rose bush because he liked the name of it. It puts out the most fragrant blooms...I just love it. Here's the rose (Angel Face):

So no profundities today (not that that's a regular feature here), just thinking about roses and my mother and summer and wondering what this summer would be like. And when my roses will start blooming again.