Sweet Kate

Charis mentioned in a recent post that my symbol, or image, is the rose. This surprised me, because I wouldn't have picked the rose as my symbol, but it fits so completely perfectly that as soon as I read it, it was like a little mini epiphany, and I knew she was right. I don't have roses all over the place, or books about roses, or little roses on binders or anything like that. I have rose petals from my rose bush sitting in a cup for when I need the sweet comfort of faded, slightly dusty roses, and I have Rose Daughter. It isn't an obvious image. And yet, roses are pervasive. I can scarcely write a story in which roses don't slip their way into it, one way or another, and I have written many stories in which the roses are integral. They are an image of love, but not just of romantic love, but of friendship, of affection, of any love that is good and virtuous and makes one better for it. Tangled up in this is McKinley's Rose Daughter, because I first fell in love with roses reading that book. I remember the library I borrowed it from, and I remember the cover. The first few times I read it, I loved Beauty more, but I slowly realized that I loved Rose Daughter more. I wanted to be that Beauty, with her quiet virtue and deep love, her stubbornness and love of roses. In that book, McKinley defined roses as an image of love, and I fell in love with them. One of the roses at my house, before we moved, was my rose bush. It was beautiful and the largest of the rose bushes, and I used to talk to it, just a little. It would grow taller than me, and the roses were old fashioned, full cups of creamy white and pink petals softer than silk or satin that made my fingers feel rough as they caught on every hangnail or callous, with a funny little twist in the petals around the center until it opened to show the center. It smelled of roses, but a rich, fragrant scent, something of citrus in the evenings. That is how my love of roses started, and then I found added to the tangle Tam Lin, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and roses wending their way through many fairy tales. And if that were not deep enough, there is the Rose of Sharon, and the white celestial rose of the Divine Comedy which is one of the last images of Paradise.

Roses are an image for me, almost never this conscious, of love and beauty and goodness. They are the heart of the Beast that Beauty saves by love and magic, the tangle of briars to protect Sleeping Beauty until her true love comes to wake her, the love that Janet calls Tam Lin with so that she may save him, and the last image of the blessed in heaven before Dante is moved by the love that moves the sun and other stars. 'Roses,' as McKinley writes, 'are for love. Not forget-me-not, honeysuckle, silly sweetheart's love, but the love that makes you and keeps you whole through the worst life will give you, and pours out of you when you're given the best instead.' And that is why roses are my image.