When I stand at my kitchen sink
washing dishes I look out the window and see the grapevine growing on our fence.
Beyond the fence is the backyard of the house where we used to live and in the
yard is a white rose that blooms through all of spring and into fall.
I gave the rose to my husband for
our 10th wedding anniversary and also because his mother had
died just five days before. That was 20 years ago, but I can still hear her
voice, the rhythmic, soft tones of a woman who’d come here from the Scottish
highlands, where she lived on a farm and milked cows and cooked dinner over a
peat fire.
She tried working and living in the town of Aberdeen for a while,
but then her older sister died and she had to come back to help her dad and
three brothers on the farm. She was in her early 30’s before she could make her
escape to Toronto, where she met her husband, a printer who’d just emigrated
from Glasgow. My daughter looks a little like her, and my son has the red hair
of his Scottish forebears.
Last year our next door neighbors built a pergola in their backyard. On one side of the pergola is a trellis and on the trellis the white rose, which once grew low to the ground, has gone wild, growing taller, reaching wider than I thought possible.
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