The rose gardens of the mind

This year, because we're living in our small apartment near the woods, I don't get to tend a real garden. But that doesn't mean that I can't have the enjoyment of a potted one.

Recently, after I participated in an admissions event for prospective students, the organizer gave me this mini-red rose as a thank-you present. Little did she know the pleasure that she was giving me, not only because it was a thoughtful and unexpected gift, but also because roses have much significance in my life.

After my operation 7 years ago, when my husband and I finally moved to our first home in the suburbs of Ohio, the first thing I decided I wanted was a rose garden. I wasn't sure why having a rose garden was so important to me, but my husband humored me and we planted several new roses around the house, where the previous owners had planted some that were not only rather homely but very difficult to care for. But a rose is a rose is a rose, I said, and I tried not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The thing with roses is that, depending on their nature (if they're tea roses, for instance), they can be extremely difficult to care for and very temperamental. In my rookie ignorance I planted the most tantrum-prone and the most uncooperative, which were also invariably attacked by hungry Japanese beetles. One sweltering August day, I actually found myself outside, among my roses, trying to drown the hideous beetles, one by one, in soapy water. For a beginner gardener, and one who is as pathologically afraid of bugs as I am, this was a life-changing experience.

From there I moved away not just from the suburbs but from difficult-to-care-for roses and gravitated instead to the miniature and heirloom kinds, including a beautiful and sweetly perfumed cabbage rose my mother-in-law gave me, which we planted in our second home in Ohio. Every summer, that cabbage rose would bloom gloriously and infuse the garden with its lovely aroma.

This year, all the roses of my past are gone, and I only have this tiny red rose until we have a home again and I get to garden for real once more. But, somehow, the little rose is enough because its charm and beauty is all that is needed to bring a smile to my face when I step outside my door into my make-shift potted garden.

Years ago, I did figure out why roses, and colorful flowers, have such an important meaning for me. When Crohn's Disease had taken over my life, I remember feeling like my soul had become a wasteland, a barren soil, cracked by humiliation, and pain, and overwhelming despair.

The heroic therapist who helped me believe that I would be whole again and thereby helped me regain my desire to live (herself a cancer survivor who, many years later, eventually succumbed to the disease), taught me to do visualization exercises based on imagining beautiful gardens, which I had to fill with every kind of flower. I filled my imaginary gardens with roses of every color: purple, blue, red, orange, yellow, pink, and even black.

Visualizing my inner garden as brimming with life and overflowing with flowers helped me regain the joy of living I had lost after my first bout with Crohn's, which would not be my last, or the hardest. That inner garden is now part of the vision of my life, and that's why, I finally came to understand, I try to replicate it everywhere I live.

In our small apartment near the woods I may not have a real garden, but the potted one I've started to build is enough in its simplicity and, ultimately, in its hidden message. Because, despite the hardships that life sends our way, as long as, in our minds, we are grateful for the kindness of blossoming, and we can celebrate simple beauty, we might just be alright.