Looks like a Secret Garden
Last week my friend Doris invited me to stop by. We get together every few months at her house. She serves coffee or tea and delicious sweets. Her husband, Howard, usually stops puttering to say hello, pausing at the table to give a big hug and nibble a cookie.
Beautiful pink roses
This time Doris urged to bring my camera.
“The roses are blooming so beautifully,” she said.
As we sipped our coffee, we looked out over the back garden.
Oh, yes, the pink roses shimmered in the height of their blooming. They looked alive as they wove up the garden fence. Their perfume, surely, was intoxicating.
I hoped the sun would come out and do justice to the photos. It played hide-and-seek, blinking in and out from the white clouds overhead.
Smell the fragrant perfume…
Pink flowers always remind me of friendship.
They remind me of the beauty of our relationships with dear ones. With our friends with whom we’ve grown, laughed, shared.
Soft ambiance
How many friends have we had in our lifetime? How many have come and gone? How many have fallen to the earth?
I think of an old saying about friends. Some come into our life for a minute. Some for a day. Some for a month, a season, a year. Some stay for our school years. Some stay during the time we’re raising children. Some linger for a decade or two, or maybe six. Some hold our hands on our deathbed.
Sometimes we think that every friend should be a lifetime friend.
I think not. Some come and some go.
Fallen rose
We need to intuit when to continue to nurture our friendships and when to let go. Sometimes we release in order to allow new energy to come into our lives. Sometimes we nurture in order to deepen.
It’s always a dance–this dance of friendship.
A rose by any other name…
A friend delivered a birthday card last week decorated with flowers and birds. The words said, “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive…”
She then listed the qualities that she admired in me, and how she desires to embrace them.
What we admire in another person is often a mirror for us, is it not? Perhaps I am simply a mirror for her to see her own love, empathy, compassion, honesty, integrity and humor.
Thank you, all my dear friends, for what you share–and for what sometimes I can only weakly reflect in your blooming light.
Bursting with life
As Doris and Howard shared their beautiful pink garden blooms I looked in their faces and saw love reflected there.
Thank you for sharing your beauty, my friends.
May we all continue to bloom and share the flower of our lives with those we meet.
Howard pauses to smell the roses
What have you learned from your friendships? Is there a special friendship that blooms more vividly for you right now?
*Friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold* –Oliver Wendell Holmes
How very fascinating….on Saturday I attended a lecture about church
needs and as I was leaving, a woman approached me and it was Marlene
whom I have not seen for at least 30 years….and we just hugged and
shared deeply and with much laughter and moments of just looking into each other’s face……what a gift….the friendship bloomed again right there
between us, for the days ahead!
Fountainpen
It really does look like a secret garden. How delightful to spend the day with roses and friends. Orion and I are gearing up to spend next week with friends and oak trees. Doesn’t have the gentle elegance that the rose garden does, but the sense of being held is always present in the oak grove. Happy birthday. 🙂
A lovely lovely post about a lovely day with friends – those charms of our lives.
Ahhh, so beautiful — all of it. Thank you, my friend 🙂
Hello Kathy, Next week I’ll have lunch with 3 close friends – the 4th of the Girlfriends is in the UP near you for the summer. Probably, we’ll call her on the phone and all chat together for awhile. These are friends I made after moving to CO over 20 years ago. My friends from “before” have drifted away as the miles between us made visiting more difficult. I also have blog friends, of course – people I often haven’t met face to face. They “know” me only from my writing and so perhaps don’t really know me at all. I hold a handful of people close and call them” best friends.”
What a beautiful tribute to your friends, Doris and Howard. Their roses are so lovely. And thank you for sharing this meaningful message about friendship. Our friends are truly precious treasures who enrich our lives with their own. Thank YOU for being my treasured friend. ♥
Very nice post. I currently have a friend that I consider letting go, although it’s not easy.
Funny you should post this today. I’m struggling with a friendship I’ve had for almost 30 years. I’m going to visit Chicago in a few weeks, and we will probably get together. That is … if she can squeeze me into her schedule. I’ve debated whether or not to discuss an issue I’m having in our friendship. Would it do any good? Would it only push her away? Would it fix things? She has a tendency to withdraw if there is a problem. Sigh. I’ll probably just live with it. I love her the way she is anyway, I just wish things went a little smoother for us.
Those pink roses are breathtaking.
Lately I’ve been finding old friendships being renewed after some type of sadness brings us back together. The death of a parent, the illness of a mutual friend we rally together and discover each other again.
It is almost like the cone of the Jack Pine that opens up after a forest fire.
At the moment, the activity in my friendships is with my husband, my best friend of about 30 years, and then with dear people like you, Ben and a number of Facebook friends and colleagues who are especially close.
Have let at least one friendship go even though we’d been friends since we were kids and I saw her through 2 marriages and the loss of one child. She just isn’t there for me anymore though we tried to rectify that last year to no avail. Hard to let go though. Lovely post.
Kathy – I don’t know when I’ve seen more spectacular roses. It does, indeed, look like how I pictured “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (one of my favorite books from childhood). And I can well imagine the heady fragrance that whirled around your visit with Doris and Howard.
I am richly blessed. I have some good friends that I have never met, but who are so very special to me. You may know who I mean. 😉
I have newer friends, I met since I moved her four years ago.
And I have older friends who have come to visit me here. The most special was my childhood friend, Betty. Aside from a brief visit seven years ago, we hadn’t seen each other in 40 years. We’d barely kept in touch. We’d had children, marriages and divorces in the meantime. When we got together it was as if the intervening years hadn’t happened. We shared little of our lives apart, but revelled in our time together.
Like I said, I am richly blessed.
Kathy – Thank you so much for this beautiful post. I can smell those roses and feel the warmth of your good friends wanting to share them. I’ve been thinking a great deal about friends of late as well and have been writing letters to those I have lost. It is never to late to tell them how much they have meant in my life. Thank you for the pink beauty!
Very beautiful! Pink roses do give us the realization of this special thing called friendship. Very nice thoughts Kathy. I love Doris’ garden, I can almost feel the fragrance.. many thanks to you Kathy. You are a dearest & the most lovely friend. 🙂
Kathy,
Mom and dad were ” tickled pink” you wrote about their roses. Thank you for being such a good friend to them.
Cheryl (dtr)
I have never appreciated friends as much as I do now. I think I will give them all some roses.
Gorgeous roses. Nice job on the photography! And beautiful words about friendship. I have one dear friend who I am sure will be a forever friend. We met when I was 6 and she was 5 and my sister was 4 and we’ve remained friends through moving apart, getting married, having kids. 38 years of friendship so far!
There is no shortcut to a long friendship, but the old song we used to sing is true, too: “Make new friends and keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.”
This is a beautiful post, from words to photos. It’s very hard to know when to let a friendship go, but I agree with you. Some friends stay, and some go. May you always be blessed with enough friends.
I am a lucky woman, Kathy. I have many friends out there (like you) in the blogosphere, from whom I learn about life every time I visit them. But I also count two women of other mothers as my sisters, although we don’t live near each other any more. Distance does nothing, though, to temper our deep connection to one another. ❤
I would love to be able to grow roses like that.
Friends are the most precious thing we have. Friendship is a time and heart investment we make for our life. Even though life situations cause some of our friendships to be distant (in time and/or place), I would like to believe that when we meet again we will still feel the friendship we built, that it never really ends.
Beautifully expressed, Kathy. I treasure my friends whether they are with me for a brief moment at the bus stop or they are life long “sister” kind of friends. I think roses represent friendship very well.
Thank you for this beautiful story and the photos, I do believe I hear my heart singing now! And thank you for your friendship and wisdom, dear Kathy. xxx
thank you so much, dear Kathy, for the beauty of the flowers and the thoughts and feelings you evoke. The energy of friendship is indeed stirred up for me to contemplate again, and love all the comments, too!
One thought: Some friendships are built on time, some on depth. Not necessarily both, but if we have both, we have a special treasure.
Oh what lovely roses!!! And what a wonderful couple of friends you have to cherish in Doris & Howard… Right now my friendship with my husband is blooming more vividly than ever as we are facing a pretty tough situation together. And my cat, Zoë, who seems to understand everything I say to her…
So beautiful Kathy, the roses, your thoughts, all of it. I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately and feeling some sadness, there has been a lot of going lately.
And please thank Doris and Howard for sharing their lovely roses and selves, such a delight.
Just happened to find your blog. My mother grew up in Pequaming, and has such wonderful memories of those years. In the last couple years I read the history of the area. Fascinatin! Mom is in a nursing center in Southern MD now. I would like to visit the UP…..wish I’d gone with her.
Thank every single one of you for your friendship and comments. I smelled rose-perfume when I read all your thoughts! Bless all of you so much.
Ah, friendship and roses, beautiful roses in your friend’s garden ! How can one express better what friendship means ? I try to do my best to keep friendships alive, a little note, a letter, a visit, a call now and then. Any way I can find to let them know they are close in my heart if not geographically. Thank you for reminding us about how precious friends are. Lovely, lovely photos.
Such beautiful roses! You are lucky to have friends willing to share that beauty with you. 🙂
There are so many treasured friendships in my life, I feel truly blessed. Some I’ve known since childhood, others are fairly new in the whole scheme of my life, but valued, nonetheless. 🙂
A pertinent post for me, as usual. Have been making painful decisions about some of my friendships these days. Good to read your words at this point in life.
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What a lovely post, Kathy. Thank you. I enjoyed stopping to smell the roses on this beautiful Sunday morning. 🙂
Hmmm, I can almost smell the scent of those heavenly roses…
I love your wish, “May we all continue to bloom and share the flower of our lives with those we meet.” Wholeheartedly agree. Sending warm, spring-and-blossom-filled hugs your way.