My mother once told me of the rosebush that bloomed just outside her bedroom window in rural Oklahoma. They were pink, she remembers, her favorite. The scent would waft through her open window and drift softly on the breeze, gaining the attention of her senses as she lay in bed sweating through the hot Oklahoma nights.
Maybe my mother is why I planted all those roses last summer. My flower beds are full of them now. From the easy-to-care-for Knock-out roses so common in Tennessee to David Austin roses, (even a few tea roses saved from the clearance rack at Wal-Mart and Lowes!) my home is surrounded by color and the perfume of their fragile blooms. Some of them are huge, a few are struggling to take hold, but they all smell heavenly. Especially the English Tea Roses.
I noticed it just the other day as I stepped out my front door to the brick porch with the crumbling mortar and loose railing on one side.
(I really need to get that railing fixed.)
It was five thousand degrees outside with 120% humidity (if you live in the South, you know) and I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the brutal brightness of July’s sun. The scent of roses drifted across the hot breeze and immediately I thought about my mother and her childhood home. I envisioned the farm where she grew up, the stories of my grandmother wringing a chicken’s neck before preparing it for dinner and biscuits left neatly on the pan after a tornado whisked the tablecloth from right under them. Stories I relish as I now tell my own version, my own memories, to my grown kids. As I stood on the porch with the broken railing, I imagined my mother as a girl, lying in bed with pajamas sticking to her pale skin. I am sure the crickets were chirping as the moon rose. Maybe Venus was bright alongside the Big Dipper. My mother’s hair was likely a mass of wet curls framing her freckled face, and I wonder if an oldie was playing on her bedside radio.
The things that were once common seem so special now. In an era of scented candles and oil diffusers, of HVAC systems preventing us from sweating on a hot summer night, and of tightly sealed houses we miss the sounds and scents that marked the childhoods of our mothers. As much as I hate sleeping in a hot room and am grateful for air-conditioning, the longing for common things makes me want to cut a few roses and arrange them in that forgotten milk-glass vase beside my kitchen sink. Maybe my dreams will take me back to a simpler time if my sleep is enhanced by the blooming roses dropping their petals on my nightstand. Yes, I think I will do that.
The world is moving too fast. Technology is becoming so smart it is truly scary. I don’t want anything to do with AI or its ilk. I am weary of innovation and the attempts to “crush” the old ways. Give me a dog-eared book. Give me a typewriter, for crying out loud. Give me a table with a French Press in the center surrounded by friends sharing the good and the hard over coffee with too much sugar. Give me peace and quiet and my grown children snuggled up beside me as we read another chapter of that book we all once loved together. Yes, give me the common.
For it is in the common that we rediscover our true selves. It is when the world around us is quiet that we hear the inner dialogue begging to be heard. We look up and finally see the beauty just beyond that six-inch screen. We feel the brush of a rosebud gentle against our nose as we inhale deep into our bellies…and sigh.
And maybe, just maybe, it is in the common that we remember the gentle whisper of the Father over us, the Voice we knew when the world wasn’t so loud, speaking love over us. Yes. Give me the common. Please.
Jeannine, kindred spirits you and I. I agree with everything you have written here. Simple. Quiet. Still. Michael Card has said: No one likes silence because the silence says too much. But in that silence, we hear God in the Whisper. The enemy loves to have noise and the cacophony of sounds around us at all times. We have to intentionally say, NO and travel the ancient paths, where the good way is.