Love is a Rose

When I was young, my inquisitiveness led me to ask questions of everything. Why were people on the earth? Who made the sky? Why do airplanes disappear in the Bermuda Triangle?

And the biggest question of all: What happens when we die?

My mother would answer my questions as best she could. These often turned into meandering conversations that never answered the question but instead acknowledged that I was making important inquiries into mysteries that really have no answer.

In the summer of 2000, my mother was dying of pancreatic cancer.  One day while she was in the hospital, she asked me what I thought would happen when she died. I said I didn't know.

"I want to send you a sign that there is something beyond," she said. "What would you recognize?"

I thought about this for a while, running my mind over the things in my house and in my yard. "Send me something orange," I finally said. "I don't have any orange in the house or the yard."

I did not forget this conversation but I also did not expect much to come of it. Nor did I mention it to anyone.

For my birthday the next year, my closest friend gave me a rose.

I planted it. It took a long time to bloom, but it's first bloom appeared in August, 2001, a year after my mother passed away. The bloom was a lovely orange.

And it has bloomed a lovely orange for me in late summer every year since.