Just Rosy

People who visit my office probably wonder why, for the longest time, I had a dead rose on my desk.  It may have been shriveled, but its scent was still divine!  My lovely friend Diane dropped by my office a few weeks ago to give me a wild rose.  She had read one of my reminiscences about the old-fashioned roses we had in our yard when I was a girl and she wanted to deliver the flower to me.  Although Diane's rose grew along the side of the road near her house and not as a shrub, it looked and smelled very much like the roses I had written about: Delicate pink petals, lots of tiny thorns on the stem, and the scent, that heavenly, spicy scent!  Even though it was completely wilted, that rose's scent lived on for weeks.  Whenever things got stressful or I felt like an octopus with hands in too many work projects at once, I could literally stop and smell the roses (or in this case, the single rose on my desk).   That glorious scent stilled and calmed me and reminded me of all that is lovely about summer.