There are roses outside of the bakery, Doms on Washtenaw. It’s funny how things are stolen from Natives and forgotten. For example, the word, Washtenaw; originally Washtenong. Meaning, ‘far away waters,’ in Anishinaabemowin. It’s just a street. But I wonder, the streets, in this city as rivers like veins to a greater source. But still, there are roses here.
Last week I was driving down the highway at 80 miles per hour. my grandma besides me, and sisters playing in the backseat. My hands gripped the wheel, and I stared down the yellow white lines.
They cut down the garden at the house, she told me. As if it was still somehow her’s, our’s. This new couple owns it now. Like ghosts we visit often. Like losing the marriage, then the house, the jobs, and the old cat- the garden slammed the door to her old life behind her.
Driving, I could offer little sympathies. I just reached for her shoulder, now full of bones and small, in my small hand.
“I won’t go by there again. Not for awhile,”
It’s for the best, I said.
“But, they had enough sense not to take out your rose bushes,”
Spoken as if I had planted them. No, my grandmother planted those roses off the porch of that old house. She planted them in my name, in my honor, at the house where I played. Where I wished to always be small and for the world to stay that way. Where I was loved. Held. Where I was uncombed and overfed, dirty from the wood I emerged from. That house. Those roses. At least we have that. And they will have that piece of us. As if anything else was worth keeping.
You can never return home
I focus on the road ahead. Lost in the clouds, content in that loss, and satisfied in my mission of driving the people I love home.
I am looking for a new home myself. I toured an apartment in a house, in the town I went to college in and barely ever tried to leave. I waited out in the new heat, waiting for some door to open. There, off a porch was a rosebush. As pink and red as the other roses in this poem. And I smiled. Knowing, that this would be the place. This could be my home, for there are roses.
The name for roses in botanical science is Rosa rubiginosa. In Anishinaabemowin, it’s Oginiiwaatig. Scientific names remove the spirit of the word. It claims knowing, and strips any identity of the rosebush. It says,
‘Yes, I know a rose: It has X qualities, this genus, that biome...”
‘Yes, I know the rosebush. I have felt it, I have seen her. She’s my home. My grandmother’s love. She is kin to me, and her fragrance reminds me of sweet, hardworking women.
I sat on a bench covered by the shade of a tree dedicated to staff on their lunch breaks. Birds, soft delicate things bathing in dust near. Cracked open my book and read Odell’s words about roses;
“Beautiful garden, vs terrible world- it really did feel like a survival tactic,” spending hours doing nothing, but being in a rose garden. How those roses could keep me alive, as I keep them, as the whole world does.
On my walks I stop often. Putting my face in every fragrant branch; making it my essence to stop and smell the roses. Really smelling them reminds you almost of winter to come. Spring, already gone. It’s summer now, I’m young now. Nothing lasts forever.
This is what concerns me; Nothing. I’ve made my life, confronted by Nothing. And found none other than myself. I have the time. We have roses. And this is how we live.
