A year ago when I was in the middle of being very ill, a thud came upon my porch. It was a long slender box, and inside were roses. Not a dozen roses, but two dozen roses, and not roses yet, but rosebuds. From the high mountains of Ecuador. They were in autumnal colors: russet, gold, copper, vermilion, coral, yellow. And they opened up in a day or two into full-blown petite roses.
They were a gift from a dear friend of mine, Siu-yung.
Roses from out of the blue. I had found myself in such a dark place, and here roses arrived like a flowering torch to light the darkness. This unexpected gift seemed to say that miracles lie in wait, everywhere.
I did not have my camera back then, but these roses above by Renoir come very close to the colors of my roses from Siu-yung. His painting even comes with a blue curtain to go with my "roses out of the blue."
This photo above shows what remains of the roses today, all the dried rosettes and petals, a few still rich enough in color to be jewel-like.
And I should tell you a little bit about how I know Siu-yung. She was one of a lovely group of women with whom I had the great good fortune to work when I was getting my footing in the world after ten years on the loose, when I was writing short stories and trying to learn how to be a graphic artist and studying to get my Master's in Education.
The stars had brought us all together in one of the many continuing education departments under the large umbrella of The University of Texas at Austin. We were an unexpected group of women, interested in astrology, literature, the arts, the theatre, the home, poetry, music, meditation, nutrition, everything from Shakespeare to Country Western to New Age.
Siu-yung was our Chinese poetess. And if I remember correctly, she came to our country by way of Hong Kong. And when she walked into our lives in that very star-charmed work place, she cast spells that made magic begin . . .
Here is a 19th century painting of "Roses Lying on Gold Velvet," an oil on canvas by Martin Johnson Heade.
This painting does not capture the autumnal colors of my surprise roses, but I love these red ones against a faded golden cloth, and the simplicity of this painting, the warm dark background, the folds in the velvet, the mixture of full-blown roses with rosebuds and leaves and stems.
It is a year later, and of course, I no longer have these roses in their bloom, but I have almost all of the dried rosettes, a few rosebuds, and all of the petals. I never let go of a rose. I always save the petals.
To try to mirror the Heade painting, I laid my dried roses on an old tapestry of my grandmother's in front of a black cardboard background.
Ahhhh, I thought it would be so easy to take photos of a still-life. I thought that photographing people is what would be hard. But I am finding out that there is a very high art to all those photographs in "house and garden" magazines that look so perfectly beautiful. An art that I have not yet mastered!
This is one little part of the tapestry. I don't remember where it hung in my grandmother's house. I have a feeling it draped either over the piano or over a library table in her lovely, long parlor. I keep it in a trunk, I'm afraid. I love its golden colors with touches of olive green and rusty red. It is very threadbare in places, and I love that, too.
If you look closely, you will see a figure, a woman holding a fan in her right hand, and pointing with her left hand. She is wearing an elaborate robe, and I love how the tapestry itself becomes her robe, so that she is wearing a little piece of the tapestry. Maybe that fan is the back of a mirror, for she does seem to be gazing into it as if she were looking at herself.
But that pointing finger ~ she seems to be trying to tell us something. I wonder what it is?
I am going to think to myself that the lady in the tapestry represents all of us who come together in some star-influenced time, looking into the universe, finding, sometimes not finding, but always searching for the answers to the mysteries of the world.
The rose petals live here now, in a glass vase in the jumble that is our kitchen, on a little island table in the middle of the kitchen, almost hidden amongst a caddy for mugs and two tomatoes and my little pumpkin, and dwarfed by yet another glass vase, an enormous one, which holds many very tall-stemmed silk sunflowers.
Every time I brush past this little island table, I brush past the memory of being surprised by a dear friend with roses out of the blue, and then I remember all of those lovely women from those years from the past, and all our long-ago conversations, which are still on-going . . .
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