Spring Isn’t Always About Flowers

Anyone who knows me knows I love my flowers, especially roses. Something within my soul connects with the blooming beauties. The season of Spring erases the dull ache of Winter with gorgeous blossoms to engage our senses.

Vibrant reds, violets, yellows and greens replace lackluster browns and grays. One day everything is asleep, and the next when you wake, the world is in color again. It seems to happen overnight. The subtle changes aren’t easily noticeable until they are all in place.

But Spring isn’t always about life and joy and rebirth. Sometimes it can be a season of sorrow. For myself, this year I find I am heartsick. Although this last winter wasn’t as difficult as some have been, my beautiful tea rose by my front door seems to have lost the will to survive. Here before we moved in, the rose has weathered the past ten years we have lived here.

Every Spring this beautiful bush has graced us with a heavenly scent coming from delicate pink rose blooms. It truly has been a thing of beauty and a treasure to enjoy. There is a hint of life in it this year, a hope that it may yet return. This is the first year I can take the time to watch it daily instead of just noticing it on weekends. So maybe I’m just being impatient.

But it gave me pause to think about changes. In life everything changes. Everything lives and then has to die. Nothing is forever. Spring is a season of new beginnings. But for each new beginning there has to be an end of something else.

If this beloved rose bush ends up not surviving I can replace it with another. The new young plant will need a lot of nurture and care to grow it to the size of the first. And I can grow to love it just as much. But it will not take the place in my heart of the first. It must prove its own worth to my to earn my love and affection.

As old things are replaced with new ones, we never lose the old. They are just placed in a special monument for remembrance as life goes on without them. Sooner or later each of us will be in that monument. Life as we know it here will be done. What will we have missed out on, holding onto things passed instead of being aware of our present day?

Are you stopping to enjoy today’s roses? Or holding onto roses past?