Everything’s Coming Up Roses!

Yes, I am singing the song ala Ethyl Merman (I’ve been told I do a pretty good Ethyl). There is a rosebush in my back yard.  I don’t know anything about roses, other than I like ‘em. I’ve never had an actual garden of my own.  Being an apartment dweller up until this past June when my husband and I moved into this old house, the closest I’ve ever had to a garden was a few potted herbs that I managed to keep alive until the inevitable NY heat wave came while we were out of town.  I didn’t know I needed a babysitter for my plants!

The week we moved in here, my newly adopted rosebush was in full glorious bloom and I had roses in every vase I could locate among the stacks of boxes all over the house.  We hadn’t even unpacked our clothes and yet I had beautiful pink roses adorning my dining room table, kitchen windowsills, in the bathroom and the bedroom.  I took this abundance of roses as confirmation that we had indeed made the right move.

Not knowing any better, I thought my lovely rosebush would just keep producing like mad all summer long.  Then July came and the buds died before their bloom along with the few blooms I had left on the bush to keep the garden pretty.  I thought maybe that would be it for the season.  Each day I would sit outside and silently mourn their absence.

Then suddenly the other day what did my eyes see but one tiny bloom right in the middle of my half-dead looking rosebush.  Two days later, the perfectly bloomed beauty has a friend: another tiny bud forming all the way on top of the bush!  Like I said, I don’t know anything about caring for a rosebush.  All I know is that this bush had not been tended to in a very, very long time before I came here and I wasn’t doing too much with it, either.  I know I could research this stuff online and find all the info I would need to learn how not to kill a rosebush.  But today, I simply choose to view my roses as a gift from the great beyond.

Of course, this could just be a coincidence, but my husband received a call yesterday about a job we had always thought he’d be perfect for: teaching automotive skills to young adults.  After thirty years of being a mechanic full time and a front-stoop counselor of sorts to neighborhood teens teetering on the brink of seriously messing up the rest of their lives part time, I think this will be a great match for all of his skills and his big heart.  His interview is next week and we’ve got our fingers crossed that he’ll get the job.

So this week, everything really is coming up roses!