Smelling the Roses

I played hooky to smell the roses. Surprisingly, the Bernstein Rose is listed as having only a slight scent; actually, it smells like the idea of candy when you’re a kid, very sweet and overwhelming and impossible to catch, and also like the kitchen when my mother and I would make sweet sticky sludge from a gallon jug of violets. We were trying to make syrup.

In the same park that housed the roses (it was the garden behind Rosenborg, for those of you playing along at home) there were ducks and pigeons and two swans. Birds of course are the same everywhere, especially ducks, but they always make me feel like I really am wherever it is that I am. Maybe it’s because once you notice a duck, you are then required to notice the way the sun breaks through the clouds behind the castle tower, and reaches over to the red tile roofs across the way, and how gravity is pulling you down onto this huge huge ball of shining green fuzz that holds everything you’ve ever known.