Ruthie and I found we shared three things in common that afternoon; dangling feet that didn’t touch the floor, laughter that was disconnected from anything logical, and a love for cats.
The second visit featured a chance to meet her beloved cat described to me as “sweet” and that early on in our visit tried to claw my face off. This was when I also discovered that Ruthie refused to use anything to help steady her walk and so I spent the remaining of my visits actively avoiding the cat who I was sure had put a hit out against me and anxiously preparing to catch Ruthie if the occasion to be a human catcher’s mitt arose.
Having met her later in her life I don’t think she ever remembered me but I will always remember her. She loved her cat and missed her husband. She doubted I was who I said I was and let me stay anyway.
Of Ruthie, I sensed an intriguing potential for making trouble and while I always waited for stories of instigation and mischief to slip out, whether because of memory or strategic choice, she never did share any.
The Ruthie I know seemed to favor difficult things. Walking without her walker, befriending temperamental cats, and tending thorny roses.
Gardening as a theme is woven through the Biblical story. Genesis 2 says that God “planted” a garden. God didn’t speak it into being in this case but knelt in the ground and literally molded it out of the mud and dirt.
If we want to know what eternal life looks like we may gather in the church but we should be digging in the garden. As George Bernard Shaw says, “The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”
The garden is the place in which we have been formed, planted, grown, tended, entangled, and one day, made new. Neither thorn nor weed finds an end in the garden yet each formed with purpose and intention returns from that which is came; the rich soil composted of a million stories bound up with the mineral of the divine. Yes, the garden reminds us of the beginning. The beginning of our world, our stories, our lives but it also reminds us that that which we define as endings are but returns from that solid place in which we were created. That we were created and planted with a purpose to grow and return to the source which gave us breath and form, purpose and plot.
What has impressed me about Ruthie is that not only did she garden, but she favored roses, and it is a biblical fact that even God didn’t mess with roses.
Roses, bearing twice their weight in cultural symbolism, finding themselves at centuries of societal debates, are arguably the most demanding and vulnerable thing one could decide to plant.
In his NY Times Article Michael Pollan writes that, “PREPARING A BED FOR ROSES IS A LITTLE LIKE getting the house ready for the arrival of a difficult old lady, some biddy with aristocratic pretensions and persnickety tastes. The stay is bound to be an ordeal, and you want to give as little cause for complaint as possible. All of a sudden the soil that has served well for years seems lacking, its drainage dubious and its pH level off. So, you begin digging, hauling bales of peat moss and blowing all at once the precious cache of compost it has taken years to accumulate.”
Roses, the most demanding child. Cats, the most judgmental of friends. Falling, the greatest risk of all. And still Ruthie choose to ditch the walker, room with the cat, and plant the rose.
I imagine for those of you who loved and befriended her it would be less intriguing as it would be slightly frustrating; to be the everyday witness to the life of a lover of thorns. At some point, it’s easier to not watch but to surrender to the long wait for late night calls with band-aids in your pocket and an “I told you so” on your face.
There must have been something inviting in the challenge these relationships presented. As if the presence of claws and thorns, the possibility of falling traded in for the risk of walking, cried comfort to someone who craved the sharp speed of a Viper Sports Car.
Perhaps all three, in making nothing easy, remind us that we are alive by preventing us from taking anything from granted. If the cat loves you, you are truly connected. If the rose grows, you have visibly accomplished something. If you remain standing, you have without question proven yourself strong enough to walk.
It isn’t circumstantial that Ruthie connected with creatures and people and places that others experienced as difficult. She connected and through this connection she birthed new life whether that was in the blossom of the rose or in a second chance at a loving partnership. The evidence to support the transformative power of her tendencies is sitting in this room; each and every one of you. You, her garden have found rootedness in her connection and blossoms in the stories that once were hers and now are yours.
We must not overlook the obvious. The meaning in your presence. The possibility in the rose.
“…They seemed far too frail to bear so much significance,” Michael Pollan writes of the arrival of his roses, “Little more than sticks, bare-rooted and swaddled in newspaper, they were completely dormant; apart from a faint swelling at the buds, they looked dead.”
Nothing is dead here. New life is just beginning. And we, we gathered here in the wake of all that was expected must leave this space seeking nothing but surprise; for how do we bring alive that which is difficult? How do we hold lightly the thorns of this life and tend them until finally a bloom and later a blossom?
