Ginny's Rose The single perfect rose of summer, a virgin's blush, unfolded petal-perfect; perfect leaves, green as jealousy, hid the wicked thorns. How we labored in spring to prepare the perfect bed, dug in sweat, mulched, fertilized, sacrificed a thousand vivid weeds, then plucked by hand the ravening beetles, the aphids, watered through the endless, rainless days. Then to see the buds come, and fail, the leaves brown, bug-bitten. Some bushes died to the root. Some were savaged by dogs. Some bloomed in the morning and were eaten back to the hips by dusk. Like hail takes the wheat, catastrophe. What to do but clear the carnage? place the bodies in the barrow and wheel them slowly down the rows of lilies back to wilderness behind the yard and the scrap heap. There, in the middle of splintered boards and brick-rubble, the birch boughs and withered lilac thinnings, tip them out in offering at the foot of the single, flawless wild rose. © Dale R. Hobson. All rights reserved.