Stop and Smell the Roses

 

Mom and Dad came in for the Easter weekend. Knowing my mom is an avid gardener, I suggested she help me make our yard look nice. So she came with her Nissan loaded down. When you opened up her trunk, you knew she was ready to prune or kill-- one of the two. 

To give you insight on just how clueless I was about what I was getting into-- when she called to say they were twenty minutes away, I said, "Oh, ok-- let me just jump in the shower real quick." She quickly informed me that taking a shower would be counterproductive.

I don't know what I was envisioning-- maybe one of the Desperate Housewives standing in her yard, seductively biting an apple while simultaneously trimming a bush. But what I got was Mom handing me a saw. I began to half-heartedly scrape at the wood, barely making a mark. "You do it like this," she corrected. It was then that Paul Bunyan took the saw from my hand and put me to shame. It hit me: THIS is why gardening was so therapeutic for her all these years. Who couldn't be patient with their teenage daughter after they just sawed down a tree?

I soon got the hang of it and, strangely enough, found it kind of fun. There's no feeling like seeing a giant shrub tumble to the ground because you made it do that. And then when we began to plant roses, there was something calming about digging in the dirt, feeling it between your hands. Mom told me to pick up the grass and shake the dirt off. Being an amateur, I picked up the giant lump and began to shake it like a salt shaker while I shook my tail feathers. Dirt went everywhere but the flower bed, and I got another lesson in Gardening 101.

So now I have ugly shrubs that Mom promises will become pretty with time, and I have premature rose bushes that will one day (hopefully) be a beautiful sight. It got me thinking-- because I am pretty much deep all the time (ha)-- we often speak about "stopping to smell the roses." And while I agree with that, I think we often overlook the fact that roses and beauty are often backed in hard work-- labor that you may sometimes feel will be in vain.

But when you have sweated, trimmed, pruned, sawed, pulled weeds and attained numerous scratches from jumping on large shrubs to get to the bottom of it, you realize that those flowers are going to have the sweetest smell there is. And you will probably be more inclined to stop and soak up their magic. 

So if you have a crappy job, keep planting. If you aren't reaching your goals fast enough, keep pruning. One day roses will bloom for you.