A Rose is a Rose is a Rose
Hi Friends,
It’s been a while since I last sent out a newsletter. You may notice a few things have changed — most notably that this newsletter is no longer hosted on Substack but on Buttondown. This should help to protect both my privacy and yours; though it limits your ability to publicly comment on posts, you can always send me words of praise in other ways. At some point, I may even add a tip jar but for now, it’s all about finding my footing again.
It isn’t just the newsletter that got a new home. After a pair of tumultuous years, I’ve found myself renting a house in an environment entirely new to me. To say it has been a challenge to get here would be understating things, yet I’m still not quite sure how to put into words what it feels like to be in this particular place in this particular moment. What to make of everything.
I rented this house in part because of its garden. After years of city living, I wanted to look out at a calm green space, step out the door and feel the grass beneath my feet. In my daydreams, I would be digging my hands in the dirt, planting sunflowers and a salsa garden, carefully tending the weeds. It’s another drought year, though, so the tomatoes and peppers dried up the minute I put them in the ground. I decided to refrain from planting anything further and have shirked my lawn watering duties. The yard has grown barren in front, patches of yellow straw intermingling atop the parched and cracking soil. The neighbors have replaced their grass with stones, parked a truck where otherwise trees or flowers might grow but the owners of this house have decided to hold out hope for rain, for greener grass in the future.
Behind the house, the other neighbors have horses and donkeys and from my office window, I can watch them grazing in the pasture. From my backyard, I can watch an alpaca wander, hear a turkey call and a rooster crow. Some days, if we’re lucky, a hawk or an osprey might swoop down and settle in on a branch of the dead ash tree growing near the fenceline. The house is temporary, my time here has a limit, so I try to appreciate the view, pausing during writing to stare at the animals who have become my respite from the tumult of the world.
I wish I could say something more profound than this about my new way of living but most days, my excitement lies in watching a blue heron swoop low over the nearby ponds or the sun set behind the 14,000 ft snowy peak in the distance. I moved to this town for its natural beauty but even that seems fleeting when the stormclouds roll in over the mountains and shroud the range in a hazy blue-violet glow. A few weeks ago, a fire broke out nearby, its smoke billowing up from the grasslands behind the prairie where I run. It’s the third fire since I’ve been here and I’ve had to get back in the habit of having my phone on at all times, just in case, but this time the emergency alert didn’t ping me. I could see the smoke off in the distance and, new to fire disasters, had to decide for myself whether to worry. Which direction to carry on running.
A week later, out on the same path, a thunderstorm rolled through, bringing high winds and hail and dangerous lightning and I found myself out on my walk alone, not quite stranded but not quite safe either. The temperature dropped from sweltering to chilly so quickly I thought I might be ill but I realized, as I turned to cut a new path back home, that the only way out was through and I picked up the pace, the sweat on my skin growing cold as ice. Weather patterns here shift quickly and though we have warnings, those warnings come so frequently these days, it’s hard to distinguish when it’s best to heed them.
In the spring, a rose garden that had been planted at the front of the house by the previous owners began to bloom. I had done nothing to tend to these roses except to cut back the rotting branches and even that I only did half-heartedly. My lease has a clause: I am to ensure the rose garden remains in all its glory, but I know so little about flower gardens, I was hesitant to sign it. I grew afraid to take a shears to the dried-up bushes in the winter. When I did, the branches were so thorny that I could not touch them. One fell on my bare foot and my toe grew red and swollen from the tiny prickers that had embedded in it upon landing. I stopped cutting the stems back, let whatever came next take shape.
The rose bushes bloomed once the snow had passed and the heat had settled in, their brown stems shooting further out of the earth, enveloped in green foliage before the bulbs arrived. Despite the arid summer climate, the roses have blossomed for weeks now, one after the other, each bringing a heady, fragrant mix of pinks. As Alexander Chee wrote in his gorgeous essay, The Rosary, roses appear delicate but have adapted to grow in most climates and these are no different. Their success in spite of my clumsy hands, the late season snow, the dry earth, is a balm so I take care to water them each day, in hopes their colors will continue to brighten my days.
These old bushes feel like a gift left behind by someone more patient, more conscientious than myself, their planting an altruism, a bet on a future that, now here, I’m struggling to witness. The flowers are not unlike the Damascan rose, which continues to blossom and be celebrated each year in Syria, despite the country’s endless war. Farmers in Al-Mrarh village continue to handpick the flowers and women in the village, continue to meet to make tea out of the fragrant bulbs and sing songs honoring the flower, in spite of everything. I know that people like to say humans are, like roses, adaptable but I don’t believe in resilience as a substitute for concern or action. People are more delicate than they look; we should not be made to grow used to having our branches cut back, our roots having to adjust to each new rocky crag or dry spell.
But perhaps this is where I need to focus more on something else Chee said in his essay, pay attention when he writes, “You can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined.”
Read more elsewhere:
I assisted a dear friend and remarkable reporter Alia Malek on this devastating report on the Syrian torture trials in Koblenz for NYTMag,
Spoke to the curator of the Brice Marden exhibition in Basel,
And wrote about the German cure for motherhood burnout in Harper’s Bazaar.
There’s more to come soon. Until next time. X, C