Signs of Disease

And yet. It buds, it tries to open.

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When I was a kid, we lived near the golf course and stray balls would land in our yard, treasure dropped from the sky by God, or bad golfers.

I would take my find to the garage and my father's workbench (my mother's was for stained glass only), and fit the ball between the flat hands of the vice, sliding the steel-bar handle to one side, then the other, turning it to tighten the grip. I would search the wall of dad's tools for the saw with the thin blade and the squared-off, U-shaped frame, and, feeling the smooth wooden handle next to skin of my palm, begin to saw through the plastic shell of the golf ball, little spirals of white shavings growing in a pile, like snow, beneath the vice.

The trick was to break through the plastic shell, but not saw so far as to cut the rubber bands forming the ball inside. The bounce on that inside ball went higher than the roof of my house, but without the protection of its casing, the rubber would start to dry and decay, becoming hard and brittle and useless. Maybe this is why we do it, expose the inner workings of a thing only to hasten its death, as if we could comprehend our own eventual unraveling.

*

The closed petals of the rose in front of me form a tight sphere, just the size of a golf ball. The stems reach out from under an invasive vine that both crushes the rose and saps the nutrients it needs to push its layered buds open. The rose's leaves are a too-pale green, turning brown at the tips and dotted with yellow spots, rust or mites or signs of other disease. And yet. It buds, it tries to open, even with no care and not enough resources.

I looked up how to propagate a rose from a stem cutting. It's possible, you know. Just cut and cover with rooting powder, strip off some but not all of the leaves, poke it into a bit of soil, cover with plastic. A personal and private greenhouse for convalescing or birthing, two ends of the same cycle.

We did not have roses in the yard of our house near the golf course, even though they are one of my mother's favorites. We had a bed of iris, and my mother would at some point, out of love or boredom or both, join the local iris club, collecting rare varieties, some of which she would save, years later, by digging up the bulbs when she left my father, moving them with her to a new life.

*

I could start today, cut a stem off the dying rose bush, buy powder and soil. I'd have two weeks in which I could set my hope in bright light and watch if it decides to root instead of rot. And then, I would have to pack it in a suitcase or ship it in a box back to Texas, this California rose, that has lived in this hilltop soil for all of its life, likely 20 years or more. This dying rose bush belongs to a woman who had to leave it and her home before she was ready. I wonder at how hard we try, saving one thing and another, in place of ever being able to truly save ourselves.

*

I texted with a friend last night about the roses. She would like a cutting too. She also likes to track airplanes and the people she loves flying on them. As my husband flew home last night after a week visiting me while I spend a month visiting California, I wondered where he was in the flight and pictured all those human hearts, beating without reminder, traveling in the dark through the sky while we sleep, angels above us if only for a few hours.

Thinking about him, up there in the sky, I thought again about the rose. About how the original bush will die from lack of care and how the cutting I take will probably not survive the travel, the stress, whatever disease its mother plant has. But I have decided, this morning, that I will try anyway. Because this is what we do, string ourselves together and protect our inner tenderness by giving life where we can, a sense of its finiteness always present, as we sleep, as we fly, as we hope that somewhere a part of us will live on.

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