Easter

I celebrated Easter in my own special way this year, as often happens. I dug up my roses, functionally rescuing them from the grave and bringing them back to life. The short form is that roses don’t like cold. You have to cover them when it’s going to drop below freezing, and when the ground freezes solid, it’s usually bye-bye rose bushes. In many climates, you can get by by covering them in a heap of mulch, or even by employing “rose cones” which are a structured sort of perma-cover for the winter. Here in Minnesota, we bury our roses. With the roses underground, and also under a layer of mulch, they survive most winters okay. This is one source for this info, and This is another. Suffice it to say, I didn’t make this up.

Rose bushes are a high maintenance sort of plant, and they’re a commitment. They tend to be pricey, labor intensive, and highly rewarding (if they live). I didn’t expect to like keeping rose bushes, but I do. I also never expected to get married, but I did. I never in my life expected to live to thirty…and we’re well underway to that. Lots of weird stuff going around. I’ve also noticed that if you plant two or three bushes a year for a few years…pretty soon you’re one of those people with roses everywhere. I’ve grown attached to them.

It’s just downright strange and spooky to, in the fall when things are beginning to die, dig your roses a little rose grave and tilt them into it. It’s even stranger, yet deeply fulfilling to get them back out of the soil alive, as seems to have happened this year.

Huzzah for the return of life to the world. Huzzah for spring, and huzzah for the roses that arose, living, in their original form, from the grave.

On a totally unrelated topic, “Hellboy” is just a bad movie. I completely agree with one of my fellow patrons who remarked to his buddy as we were all trooping out of the theatre: “What was I THINKING?”