Rosa 'Buttercup' 23 August 2023

Today is a grey day and I am wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt. I felt a tad low but I improved a bit when I went out to the deck garden and noticed that the English Rose, Rosa ‘Buttercup’ was in bloom.

My Rosemary banned yellow from our garden until she saw the single tea rose, Rosa ‘Mrs. Oakley Fisher’ bloom and then I used it to photograph our granddaughter Rebecca with it.

Paradoxically I now associate yellow; Buttercup is a gentle yellow, with my gentle, petite and classy Rosemary.

But beneath my smile at spotting Buttercup I am consumed by an unending melancholy caused by my defining term, an absent presence.

People may have a family album and they might open it every once in a while. I have large family portraits and portraits of Rosemary hanging on the wall. I cannot escape them. Every object, furniture, towel, our two cats, are all reminders that she is no longer with me.

There is something indelible about a portrait of my wife, the memory of when I took it and the circumstances that brings with it a nostalgia better defined by the Portuguese saudade which  while difficult to explain exactly it is about a sad nostalgic longing for something (in my case a person) that cannot be brought back.