The Aloha Rose. Fragrant. Velvety petals. Blooms all summer, till frost.

*****

Two weeks ago, I wrote about weather in the Mad River Valley of Vermont. This past weekend, we skied through some of the toughest weather in years—a lively combination of snow, wind, pea-soup fog, and dangerously cold temperatures. It’s a lot of work to arrive at the summit of a mountain being battered by weather and to ski back to Earth from that summit. The work is worth it—you get the trails all to yourself, you get to exist as part of a storm, and you get to collapse, later, brand new.

We went to dinner with a nice group of old and new friends. Some are still working, others are retired. The question What do you do for work? blessedly, never made it all the way around the table to where I sat, with my glass of wine and my ideas for an answer. There are so many things I do for work.

I love work.

*****

Oh, work—if thou were a rose, indeed, thou would grow the sharpest, most plentiful thorns along lengthy, overarching, invasive, multi-branched stems. Beneath thy bowers would accumulate the crumpled forms of bloodied, harassed little beings, hissing and cursing and writhing about. Trapped in your web of jammed and twisted traffic routes, ladders to the top, and paths to recognition, the hard workers would brag about how bloody you caused them to become, how unfairly you paid them, and how cruelly you blocked the ways to, and beyond, the summits of joy.

Furthermore, though your rosebuds unfurl, casting heavenly scents to sweeten neglected happiness—your brambles, it seems, remain consistently smeared with the bloodied bodies, plugged up noses and blinded eyes of grumblers.

They were never able to stop and notice the soft touch of your rose petals, falling to the ground, brushing away tears and smoothing out wounds.

******

I grow roses.

I planted them in my gardens without knowing much about them. They stabbed me. Ensnared my hair. Bloodied my days with wounds that throbbed to the pulse of my heart muscle.

I like to collect rose petals and arrange them into luxurious shapes.

I cook the rose petals until they are transformed into botanical clay and then I roll the clay into beads.

I make tea with rose hips. I dry the rose hips and save them to study or to use in fairy house construction.

I make sure to leave rose hips on the plants for wildlife treats in wintertime.

I make rose water, distilling the fragrance from the petals. It makes my entire house smell rosy.

Roses are a lot of work.

I’m not paid to work with roses. I’ll never become famous because I like roses in my gardens, or because I like to visit them in other gardens of the world, or because I love to read about them and hear songs about them and see artwork that honors them.

Roses can be a bad-boy kind of thing to fall in love with.

*****

I work hard to grow rosebushes near the front porch where I keep a small bistro table with two chairs. You can place onto that table the nicest glasses of wine from the most prestigious vineyards of the world. Next to the wine, you can set out a plate of artisan-baked bread, with cheese—artfully produced in Vermont or France or Italy. The wine maker, the bread baker, and the cheese maker will all be there—in spirit—their hard work appreciated, revered, savored.

I can rely on the promise that a breeze, religiously drifting forth into this romantic setting, will find my roses and rustle them gently. The breeze will rise up, travel some more, and push away the bouquet of the wine, the musk of the bread, and the stink of the cheese. All dressed up in the sensational perfume formed by a once-in-a-lifetime blend of faraway winds, swirled up with sunshine, soil, and my roses—that genteel, sweet breeze will make anyone feel brand new.

One of my roses grew like a heart.

*****

Graham Rose, who was a gardener and a writer, and a correspondent for the London Sunday Times, wrote that the gardener “contrives to make us ignore the world outside and believe that the impossible is readily attainable. The very best of them can take a miserable yard and, by clever construction and planting, lead us down an enchanting track to the idyllic corner of Arcadia, while blinding us to eyesores beyond and suppressing our awareness of noisy neighbors or the rumbling trucks that throng the road outside its walls.”

Graham Rose also wrote that gardeners are romantics and romancers who enjoy connecting themselves to extravagant fictions—remote from ordinary life.

Skiing inside a raging snowstorm feels, to me, like existing inside an extravagant fiction, remote from ordinary life.

Gardening and growing roses, too, is work I do to find and create fantasy lands where anyone can go to escape what is ordinary and become inspired to believe in what might be impossible.

I’ve worked to grow gardens on a miserable acre of land in Massachusetts for a long time. Trucks rumble by every day.

What do I do for work?

I was glad the question never made it around the apres-ski table to where I was sitting—

with my glass of wine

and a bouquet of roses

in the middle of a raging snowstorm.