When the Freeze Came for the Homestead Rose

When the freeze came for the homestead rose

It stretched every limb and caught ice and snow

And the story of how it was found by fence

In the wilds of Texas by plant-spotting men

Faded away with its sunrise-pink flowers

In the sunset and sleep and unexpected hours.

We lost one of the roses in the front, although the one in the back has become ever more of a briar thicket and tempts mockingbirds to nest and lizards to run and morning glories to usurp its branches in the summer and tangle like a scaffolding in the late fall. These are the things I'm going to miss when (if?) we move--the stories about the way that these plants came into our lives and grew us into this community. The rose in the back came from a plant sale at Mercer Arboretum, where I joined the library after years of being without a card and then the writer's group and then other poetry groups. The rose in the front was older and came from a little nursery out in Tomball with the story that they didn't know what variety it was, just that it was tough enough to be growing beside a pasture fence and therefore should be tough enough for a yard.

It was. It grew in sprays of spiny limbs, leaning against whatever small fences we tried to use to restrain its growth. In the end, it sprawled. James would trim branches but it would bloom that delicate pink each spring. Until this year, when, hard on the heels of a terrifying pandemic our part of Texas was hit with a freeze for the record books. My nephew's apartment lost power for days, we lost power, and the rose, which wasn't as securely protected as the one in the back next to the house, froze.

Some things came back from the freeze, waiting months before poking green shoots up. The rose didn't. Massive and potentially decades old (not here, but it was a piece of an older rose), the lack of protection and the extended freezing temperatures killed it and several bushes in the front. Not the wisteria or the red rose, which was bred to live in parking lots and is more feral than otherwise...but the pink rose, the homestead rose.

And now, we're on the precipice of leaving this house and all the memories. Every dog we've ever had has lived in this house. It's protected us from flood and hurricane and welcomed our family. We extended the porch but were never able to have that Halloween poetry celebration I began planning several years ago. The books I haven't written are lurking in the cracks and crevices around here. It holds these unexpected hours.

-- Chrissa

Comments

Treacle Season

Sharing with The Sunday Muse #190 , hosted this week by Carrie. Keaton was great in that show—the one with wings— Where he was constantly a [man]child on a ledge dreaming an angel who became a superhero. She was a sarcastic (fake?) angel—it was the 80s— But always good, on time, her lessons easy, Easy as it would have been for him to fall. The metaphor so obvious...but I didn't get it. Nor the easy and obvious good. (/s) I watch the TV movie every other December Remembering believing in easy And crushing on this character, that city... Angels should be sweet, sarcastic figures, knowing (like nurses and social workers) we prefer Sleeping on the ledge, reckless to call for "heroes." To clear up any confusion: there is no Michael Keaton movie we watch every holiday season. Although, if there were...I'd probably watch it. -- Chrissa

Turn Away

Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm. Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story. Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in the margins of

Revelations

Sharing with The Sunday Muse #169 : It takes time for the quest to settle into your calves, to work through your soles and up to your shoulders, spreading through nerve and vessel until you can't go home because you've already left something of yourself there. You can't be in two places at once. You remember vacations but now you think your family's plans probably resembled some supervillain's monologue: we'll do this and then take them here. It'll be fun. When do you leave the house on time? Who's time? There's a collar of dead bushes at the lawn in front of the gas station, a tiny, grassy patch of the suburbs beyond, ruins of landscaping, bright, dead. Two years ago feels like twenty, feels loud, a power wash of wind through the window; roaring down the dry sewers that funnel a/c through the lawns and backwards, carrying dreams dry and sharp. At this speed, everything cuts as it passes. Appendix 1: Chrissa is Full of Stuff and Nonsense Let'

A Weed on The Curb

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