June 28 2019

My need to know is no longer as important as it once was..

People might come to my garden and point at one of my hostas and say, “I have one of those.” That is next to impossible. The tag on my hosta is Hosta tardiflora, a dark green hosta with narrow leaves that flowers in September and not in June when most hostas bloom. Tardiflora came smuggled between two newspapers in my luggage ions ago from some hosta convention in the US.

My plants of late are teaching me to let go at this once important desire to know everything about events that framed, formed and made my life.

My mother used to tell me that I had a sister (born dead) with red hair. I never bothered to ask her when that had happened.

I never asked my mother how she met my father and why exactly, when the publisher of the Buenos Aires Herald offered my father the job of editor, that my father threw an inkwell at him.

I never asked my father why it was, that he and Julio Cortázar were friends.

My mother told me that my father danced the tango divinely but another woman who had married my father mentioned that he swam divinely and that she did not know he danced the tango.

All those empty enigmas now are not important. Suffice that I even remember some of them and that time has made most of those memories good ones while the bad have dissipated and found oblivion in my memory.

All the above is a prelude to the rose you see here. After we moved from our big house in Kerrisdale almost four years ago, the new owner more or less had the garden plowed. He did that to our laneway garden. Before we had moved many of the roses we took to our daughter’s home in Lillooet. Other roses were dug up by members of the Vancouver Rose Society.

In spite of the plowing a few leftover roses came back up. One of them is the one here. I have no idea what it is. I suspect it is some sort of Gallica but that’s it.

Most of the plants in our small garden have the proper labels that identify them, Three roses (including this one) don’t. Many hostas I took to Lillooet have had their metal tags either lost or the grease pencil name erased by the inclement weather.

Is this important? Must I know what rose this one here is?

I sort of relish the moment (I will be long gone) when someone will go through my photo files and not know who this person is or why they are posing the way they are.

In the end, the identity of all things is inconsequential when one looks at it from the other side.