the roses didn't open

I watched the process for awhile as they dominated the front office at work. When they first arrived on Valentine's Day, a gift from the boss to his wife, they had that sort of power with which fresh roses demand attention. I tried not to pay them too much attention, since I wasn't getting any roses myself and was determined to be perky about it, but I can't really help staring at roses. The world's most messed-with flower, cultivated and exactingly bred and mutated for hundreds of years until they resemble nothing of what they started out to be, and yet so beautiful they lodge themselves in some little corner of my mind and won't be shaken.

Roses have unrolled happy memories for me on a carpet of their own petals since I was a teenager, and ironically they've never had anything to do with the romantic love they traditionally celebrate. One of the best presents ever given to me was a Midas Touch rosebush for graduation my senior year in high school, from a friend who worked in a greenhouse. I planted it on the western side of my parents' house, and three times a summer it exploded with enormous pure yellow roses with a fragrance so intoxicatingly divine you wanted it to kill you. Then there was the nicest Valentine's Day of my current experience, my sophomore year in college, when my roommate's boyfriend, having remembered my story of the Midas Touch, and knowing I was single and unhappy about it, had a half-dozen yellow roses delivered to the front desk of my dorm, to complement my roommate's dozen red roses. I think I cried. My roommate, when I showed her the roses, smiled and said, "Yes, he was quite upset when he couldn't find Midas Touch roses and had to settle for generic yellow."

But since I've seldom received roses of my own, I've always been a rose stalker -- when my father bought roses for my mother, I would steal moments to bury my nose in one of the blossoms and breathe it in. Like stealing chocolates from the tin you weren't supposed to find. I couldn't help myself. So when the boss's wife's roses took up their temporary residence on top of the filing cabinets in the front office, I waited for them to come out of bud so I could sneak my little olfactory indulgences.

They never opened. Maybe it was the lack of light, or some kind of temperature flux in the office; maybe it was that as the days went by and they didn't unfold their petals I lost interest in them. I had secretly hoped to pull them out and dry them to use for decorating -- I have a couple of vases at home that could use a little filler, and dried roses are both beautiful and creepy, with that gothic charm I loved in The Secret Garden or Frost's "Asking for Roses."

But they dried themselves, in the enormous vase they came in, still in bud, and the stems inside the water started to mold, and my coworker Deb shuddered one day, looking at them, and said, "They're beginning to look like something from The Addams Family."

That's when I took notice of them again. "You're right," I said. "I'll take them home." So today I snipped off the stems with scissors and laid the roses to the side, so I wouldn't forget them.

I woke up this morning to a snowstorm and four more inches of cake frosting on my car. It had begun to smell like spring over the weekend, just the faintest traces of waking trees and earth, but it all was buried beneath the final onslaughts of winter, and it made me feel sort of depressed. Waiting for the roses to open was a little like waiting for spring. But things don't always happen like you assume; and fortunately there are adaptable back-up plans, like taking home mummified and half-blackened roses, simply because they're interesting, and you love roses, and you'll be looking at them when you carry them to the front door, instead of at the slush clogging the driveway, and finding just the right corner for their spookiness will occupy a little more time in another evening spent at home with the cat. And thinking about them will remind you of the Midas Touch rosebush resting under the snow far away in Pennsylvania, and make you look forward to the time when you can close your eyes against open roses and enjoy the simple act of breathing.