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| Rosa 'Louise Odier'& Geranium 'Rozanne' - 23 July 2022 |
Quitándome la Espina
The Spanish expression to “quitarme la espina” means to
remove a thorn (usually a rose’s) from oneself. It is used to do something that
one has been avoiding for a long time.
For reasons that I may explain in a later or earlier blog (I have not blogged since May 29, 2022), I have avoided this daily routine. It started with the failure of my Firefox and the disappearance of all my passwords. It took two months and $1000 to fix the fact that Blogger (owned by the damned unapproachable folks at Google, who if Dante were alive he would have them, Steve Jobs and Shigetaka Kurita, who invented the emoticons, in the lowest circle of hell) prevented me from entering my own blog.
Once I could blog, I kept postponing writing as I thought of all the reasons why I had heretofore written one. All this was mixed with my constant awareness that my partner of 52 years, Rosemary, was no longer with me and any sharing I might do happened only with my two cats Niño and Niña.
I shocked and offended my right-wing Roman Catholic nephew in Argentina by telling his five daughters (he is Catholic) that I was considering becoming a trans woman so that I could be a genuine crazy cat lady.
Since May and with a pleasant week in Minneapolis at the National Convention of the American Hosta Society (my youngest daughter Hilary did not trust me to travel alone so she accompanied me) I have been obsessively scanning the plants of my garden.
I have particularly put an effort in scanning roses with plants that grow with them in pots or nearby in flower beds. Why?
I am giving a Zoom lecture to the Canadian Rose Society in September and to use that lovely Alice in Wonderland word, I like to be contrariwise. My theme for the talk is Plants & their Rose Companions.
One such example is the scan here that I scanned minutes before I began to write this. It features a Bourbon Rose, Rosa 'Louise Odier' that flowers vigorously. In its pot it shares space with Rosemary’s favourite hardy geranium, Geranium ‘Rozanne’. She adored blue and when I cut the flowers and started the scan I was hit by an enormous melancholy.
In Minneapolis I made friends with a retired violist from the New York Philharmonic who had a T-shirt that featured his like of cats and books. He told me that he had lost his wife after being married for 47 years. He said that the first year he was in a state of shock. He then added, what I have suspected all along, that the second year was a lot worse. Because my Rosemary died on December 9 2020 I am definitely in that terrible second year.
Another reason for my melancholy is that many of my friends are dead, lost, or I can see that friendship sometimes fades.
I am making up for it by meeting new ones and actively socializing and inviting them to see the garden.
