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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

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