The rose I am thinking of grew at the gate of my grandmother’s garden, just past the narrow, gabled garage people used to build in the teens and the twenties: a gravel floor, not much of a foundation, wooden, with framing members exposed on the inside so that you could hang tools easily from nails on the walls and store bamboo bean poles and oak tomato stakes on the joists crossing overhead and smelling like old motor oil sweetened by grass clippings fermenting on the scissors-sharp blades of Pa’s push mower.

The rose I am thinking of colored your entrance into a countryman’s spread shrunk to fit the town lot not far from the town square, respectable orchard trees flanked a central ancient grapevine supported by lattice lofted between fence posts four feet apart that you could walk under if you didn’t mind the summer bees, and from there a rectangular patch of broken ground grew corn and beans and potatoes and tomatoes and squash and who knows what else under the sun, banked by cut flowers on all sides until it ended at the wire fence bounding Edwards’ Field upon which the LaRue County courthouse now sits, built after they tore down the old one at the center of the square with Honest Abe’s figure out front, between whose knees my big brother got stuck on the day the hometown crowd celebrated his 150th birthday — Lincoln’s, not my brother’s — and had to be extricated to the enjoyment of the gathered

It’s that rose I am thinking of, and whether it was a Rambling Red or an American Beauty or even a Mister Lincoln, I have no idea; it was just red, red and huge, red and lush, red and plentiful, the first image arising when I think of a rose or see one or hear the word, the likeness I assume employed when all roses are made, an etching experience as round and as rich as earth herself.

The rose I am thinking of scents the scene; an unsought urge has led me here, back to my grandmother’s house, specifically, to her dresser, which, refinished, now occupies the bedroom of my niece, she who bears the grandmother-pleasing name of Evelyn Elizabeth, and whose current dresser, in its prior state, had resting on it one of those round, silver plated boxes favored by the Victorians containing powder, face powder, that smelled of roses, that smelled like my grandmother, that generative force who taught me this at least, that in beauty — the real, the deep kind — there resided also love and that therefore it was truly possible to see the face of God, and for that matter, smell the face of God in the faces of the people you know and love for their beauty, using whatever sensory organ seems best to you.

The rose I am thinking of reddens the light coming through the far window of your heart, rounds off the sharp, angry angles of its garden cathedral, and fills its vaulted spaces with the powdery incense of memory, which turns out to be the very perfume of hope, because it settles the mind on the past, present, and future Christ, the Rose of Sharon as also known.