A couple of the bushes no longer produce hybrid roses but only the smaller, ancestral roses from the rootstock, but until a couple of years ago I could expect a few dozen good hybrid blooms every year. This year even the rootstock roses haven't been very numerous, and most of the hybrids that have bloomed have been undersized. I might be able to get a couple more years out of them if I put some sort of specialized rose fertilizer on them, but I don't like dealing with something that comes in a bottle labeled "rose food." It makes me think of Day of the Triffids, and I fear it might give me dreams of being devoured by rose bushes.
The spot where the roses grow, right outside the kitchen window and easily reached from the back door, would actually make a decent location for a herb garden. If the roses die maybe I'll do something along those lines with it. I'd have to put some sort of plinths with pots atop them, though, as the feral cats are accustomed to using the rose patch as a toilet. Maybe that's why the cats are doing better than the roses. However, I don't relish the thought of pee-flavored parsley.
Today was the first day since spring that I was able to leave the windows open all day. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to leave them open tonight. They were open all night last night, and the house got pretty chilly before morning. It is cooler in here this evening than it was yesterday evening, and tonight is expected to be as cold as last night, so I suspect I'll have to close the house up by midnight or so. The day still felt like summer, but the evening definitely has a touch of autumn in it. I'm sure summer has a some more warm days in store, and even a few more hot ones, but it won't be long before autumn fully takes hold. I'm eager for the first rain of the year, though that might belong delayed. At least it's going to be cool, soon, and for along time to come.
Sunday Verse
Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played
by Jack Gilbert
We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices
of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells,
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.