All Landscaped with Righteousness

All Landscaped with Righteousness

(“We’ll be looking the other way, ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness.” 2 Peter 3:13 [The Message])

I never knew all their names, the roses in my North Dakota
garden bed. Five bushes lined the driveway, from the velvet caret
to summer-noon yellow. Each winter I covered their delicate roots and
with three or four making it through the winter, I thought myself blessed to
replace the rest when spring lately warmed their cradle.

I’m no gardener, make no mistake; someone else had planted them there,
left for my adoption. Fed, watered, pruned and gifted; front yard
July mornings urged the new canes to catch up with the few.

The best blooms never saw more sun than a day or two, given away
to my wife, my daughter, and sometimes to an accidental hello;

Plus my kindergarten friend across the street.

Sad, a few weeks later,
that the rose I fetched her had “died”, I’d pluck another,
sweet pink laced with white as milk. I think she gave it to her mother,
(roses are never meant to be hoarded or collected like coins or stamps,
but displayed in ways that say the person who receives even one
floral masterpiece is more beautiful than the gifted blossom.)

Just before winter crumbled the remaining hips on their canes,
sad eyes stared me down one morning again about the previous rose’s demise.

 I could not help it, but told her, no lie, I would bring her a rose,
next summer,
that would never die.

As soon as the frost departed and left its home vacant for warm loam
crawling with life and enrichment, I rushed downtown to where
the local vendor displayed spring’s best wares underneath a warming tent,
and searched for the best, never-die rose, for a 5-year-old who would
know the difference,

And, paying with my mud-knuckled fingers, hurried to her house,
dug half a hole and knocked on the door. She giggled, her mom smiled,
and my little friend and I planted the best place for a rose to be:

Right out front, for all her neighbors to see.