French Pink

There are two climbing roses by her gate, one to each side, with velvet blooms, small, but heavily scented, suitable for soaps, salves and potpourri. They blossom out together, several hundred, perhaps a thousand whorls French pink, shading to cream, the haunt of matching shy arachnids. How tall they'd grow she doesn't know, having twined an arch of willow whips atop her gate, to bind them to.

In her middle years, her family took this place and named it for the stony creek, dry in summer, rolling through between house and garden. A storm year came; that garden up and vanished down a river to the sea, leaving them three dead plum trees and a rose.

She started fresh, by the house. For the rose she chose north, a shaded wall, and while the bush liked a hidden spring there, for drinking, it never cared for the paucity of light. It'd stretch its greeny fingers roofward, up and over; send roots drilling left and right; make awkward shoots. Shift it one more time, she thought. Maybe both sides of a sunny gate she'd build, with an arch. The spot she had in view she could muse on from her kitchen window.

Again two days of digging, and with her bow saw made one rose two. Would they take another journey? It seemed they would, though they'd always want water; She'd have to remember to make the hoses reach. She wouldn't mind if the roses wouldn't mind.