The Pink Roses

She bent down to smell the flowers, pretty pink roses. These were the only ones who seemed to want to come alive and search for familiar faces. The other flowers didn’t do as well, nor did they make quite the impact on those who admired them.

Her husband had died two years ago. She could remember it like it was yesterday, sometimes. When she was sharp as a tack, she grasped and held close to her heart everything she could remember about Tom, her husband. When days were bad, she sometimes wondered why she was in her front yard with her house coat on.

When she and Tom were in their middle ages, they became interested in gardening though some friends. They had been invited to see films at their local library on different varieties of flowers and vegetables they could grow in their area and when to plant.

The favorite flower to plant was the rose; pink roses. They planted many other types of flowers and even tried their hand at growing vegetables; but with their health problems already started, they decided it was too much work to tend to the vegetable garden.

In no time at all their yard was covered in every empty spot with rose bushes. Dwarfs, climbing, yellow, red and pinks. They would tend to them as if they were their very own babies. I believe in their hearts; they were their own children. After all, the children they had between them were grown and all living on their own.

Tom’s favorite pink roses were the ones at the edges of the porch. Every evening the two would partake of their coffee on the porch. While they smiled at each other, and sometimes held hands, they would sip their coffee and inhale the beauty surrounding them.

Life isn’t always beautiful though, and for these two special Senior Citizens; it was no different. Tom became ill. Oh, it seemed like nothing at first. A cold, perhaps a little flu mixed in. A week or so, he would be better. This story did take a left turn, as it spun out of control and Tom ended up in the hospital with double pneumonia and within a week passed away.

Oh how she missed his eyes and his smile. The rooms sang songs of silence as she wandered through them one by one, trying to figure out or remember how to go on. Life became hard for her. Tom had made wonderful arrangements. She had no worries. It just wasn’t supposed to end up this way.

She and he had made arrangements years ago, that they would both leave together. Neither one would go before the other. Now, here she sat through cold winters, watching the cardinals eat their seed hanging from the trees. She watched the snow gently fall, creating streams of diamonds from the skies.

She waited patiently, sitting quietly, looking out her window and when the good days arrived, and the buds appeared on the branches, she would go outside and bend down to smell the heavenly fragrance of the pink roses, her Tom and  her planted with love.