The Assemblagist

I wear gloves when prun­ing rose bushes. Obvi­ously. We planted two rose bushes in honor of Mom’s 90^th birth­day five years ago. Pur­chased at Plant and See in Greenville, NC, one bush remained small and insignif­i­cant due to lack of care and the other, a tea hybrid heir­loom vari­ety, spread across the picket fence like kudzu. It has small frail pale pink creamy col­ored roses and is gorgeous.

We planted more roses last year. Not long ago, our next door neighbor’s house burned and trag­i­cally, she and her dog and cat died in the fire.

House fire — our garage is to imme­di­ate right.

Dur­ing the ensu­ing months of inves­ti­ga­tion and even­tu­ally demo­li­tion, we noticed many of Natalie’s plants through­out her yard began sprout­ing or attempt­ing to grow again. In par­tic­u­lar, a few of the climb­ing rose bushes which were prob­a­bly planted almost a hun­dred years ago. We dug up the bushes and trans­planted two of them in our back­yard and gave a cou­ple to Miss Patty up the street. A few days post-​removal, St. Claire’s Truck­ing came and demo’d the remain­ing struc­ture. There is a sand-​filled empty lot where the house once stood. Fear­ful night … the fire … flee­ing from our own house at 1:00 a.m. with noth­ing but the dogs … not know­ing if our house was on fire … bad mem­o­ries. Ter­ri­ble moment in our per­sonal histories.

The roses.

A cou­ple weeks ago, I reached under a Rose of Sharon (or as Velma says, “Rose-​asharn”) to get one of Roxie’s ten­nis balls. My hand grazed an ersatz rose clip­ping left behind a few days ear­lier. A thorn pierced my mid­dle fin­ger. Aware of the dif­fi­cul­ties posed by such an injury (No, I’m not kid­ding, you can really screw your­self up big time with a rose thorn), I came inside and soaked my hand in Epsom salts and warm water. Yes­ter­day it occurred to me that a small punc­ture wound should be healed after two weeks. Mine was not, so I tram­pled over to Wal­greens to pur­chase more Neosporin and BandAids, casu­ally show­ing my friend the phar­ma­cist my fin­ger injury. She said, “ummmm, just because you put antibi­otic oint­ment on an injury doesn’t mean it’s healed. You treated the wound, not the fin­ger.” And she told me to go to the doc­tor. So I did. She pre­scribed Cipro.

Dumb injury #245.

The best part of the story, the nice part, illus­trates my Atten­tion Deficit Dis­or­der to a “T”. While think­ing about roses, I remem­bered my Mom had some rose bushes in our back yard. Not in Fort Smith, Arkansas but in Glen Ellyn, IL. Mean­while, thoughts of Glen Ellyn tucked firmly in my imme­di­ate sub­con­scious, I went submit.mule gmail to check on Dead Mule sub­mis­sions and found one from a writer in Oak Park, IL which I thought was close to Glen Ellyn so I Google mapped it and then thought, “won­der if our house at 159 Main St in Glen Ellyn is online?”

And it is! 159 Main St., Glen Ellyn, IL. My child­hood home. It used to be light blue, now it’s white. The house next door was a one-​story home, now it’s two-​story.

Think­ing about that house is much more pleas­ant than remem­ber­ing Natalie’s death or real­iz­ing how much my fin­ger aches.

How cool is that?

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