A Rose Returns.

 Her funeral was on Wednesday, July 1st.  My mother Martha.  A loss I knew would eventually come, but even knowing still so hard to accept.  She was born in 1938 in Richwood, West Virginia.

 One of 9 girls and 1 brother, daughter of Euva and Daniel.  Raised on Fenwick Mountain.  Their home on the end of a rocky road, through mountain meadows. A home I remember as a child, as being a magical place.  Where my grandmother always had Ivory soap on the wash stand, and was usually in the kitchen cooking for us.  Cooking something wonderful, maybe blackberry cobbler, or frying up fish that the grownups had caught on the Greenbriar River.

A place where cousins ran barefoot in the front yard, or just swinging on the huge front porch swing that seemed to be the center of some peaceful universe, because it never failed to keep us occupied for hours.

 My mom grew up with the values that would keep with her, her entire life. Her faith in God, her love of her family, and pride in her work, she was loved by many and touched the lives of many through her devotion to God and to doing good work in His name. She was a good woman, a devoted wife and a loving mother.  I was blessed to have her the time that I did.

 When her funeral was over and the last person stepped up to her coffin.  I went to her and said good-bye.  I took one single pink rose from one of the arrangements, I just wanted the one rose.  Took it to my room and put in some water. As we moved from place to place the rose opened a bit more every single day, until it was opened as much as it could be.  It never wilted, as we left Ohio I began to get sad dreading when the petals would start to fall from the rose, and then what would I do with it?  Not wanting to just dispose of such a beautiful flower and the memory attached to it.

And then it came into my head what I needed to do with it, I knew that on my way home to Florida I would be close to where she grew up.  I needed to take it there.  I had not been back to Fenwick Mountain for many, many years.  At first we drove past it.  But then the memories flooded back.  We pulled onto the street.   Now a gravel road, instead of a rocky dirt road.  Now adorned with a street sign.  I did not remember there ever being one there, I just remember it was “Grandma’s Road” .

It was there we stopped and I looked at the beautiful mountain meadow filled with clover.  I took the rose and put it in that field, and once again said good-bye to my mom.  I figured it was only fitting to return a rose to the mountain where once my mom spent her childhood.  My mom who was herself a beautiful rose.  She bloomed, and blossomed, and she was loved in this world.  And now she is a bloom in a much more beautiful garden where her beauty will never fade.