Roses
Every morning about six, while the sun is still unobjectionable, I go out with my scissors and clip back molting roses. There are always tight buds underneath. I, who have never before had roses, somehow stumbled out of total ignorance onto the regimen these plants like best. The roses were small and scraggly when we moved in, though the previous owner had obviously liked them enough to plant them. Now the bushes are five or six feet tall, round and dense-leafed, with so many blooms I cannot count them; the deep, deep red ones seem the happiest, and those are the ones I like best. So deep a red they border on black. An astonishing color. Then there are the white ones with pale pink splashes, as if visited by a watercolorist expert in pointilisme. The pale peach ones are the shyest, but then they do not get quite as much sun.
As I worked among the roses in my hazy pre-caffeine brain state I wondered about how our ancestors came to discover beauty. The earnest evolutionist will point out that such things are the products of leisure, and of course the exigencies of survival came first. And the clues might be there, but it takes a mind good at puzzles to comprehend the fading palimpsest painted by pre-history over the ever-changing world. I am not good at puzzles. Nor am I a historian, which is why I haven’t delved into the statistics revealed by bones telling us when Og and Grunt probably first stood upright, or gripped a bone to use as a club. I appreciate the work that goes into figuring the grim realities of early human life, the risks for survival, but the stories I want to tell don’t follow in that direction. I’m a romancer, so I try to imagine who first took a risk for beauty.
As I worked among the roses in my hazy pre-caffeine brain state I wondered about how our ancestors came to discover beauty. The earnest evolutionist will point out that such things are the products of leisure, and of course the exigencies of survival came first. And the clues might be there, but it takes a mind good at puzzles to comprehend the fading palimpsest painted by pre-history over the ever-changing world. I am not good at puzzles. Nor am I a historian, which is why I haven’t delved into the statistics revealed by bones telling us when Og and Grunt probably first stood upright, or gripped a bone to use as a club. I appreciate the work that goes into figuring the grim realities of early human life, the risks for survival, but the stories I want to tell don’t follow in that direction. I’m a romancer, so I try to imagine who first took a risk for beauty.