I know a woman who works in her roses everyday. She is also painting her bedroom ceiling blue with clouds added to look like the sky. When she talks about the ceiling she looks as though she’s ten years old, not quite able to hold in the secret delight she feels simply at the thought of such a thing. A Sky Ceiling. In her very own bedroom. She crinkles up her face with a little smile that also has to sneak out of mischief eyes as she scrunches up her shoulders and raises her eyebrows at the same time. Her feeling is clearly too big to contain for a ten year old. If you asked her how old she feels talking about her Sky Ceiling, she’d tell you 35. That’s when she went skiing wearing a lime green skiing outfit as she zoomed down the ski slopes full-confident of herself and of life being in its proper place.
More than twenty years have passed between that ski day and the Sky Ceiling. And in those years this woman has learned a lot about containing big feelings and finding disappointment and losing confidence and finding it again in a different way. And seeing life out of its proper place altogether can lead to the discovery that perhaps life has more than one proper place when you are still enough to see it. This woman has worked to find her fit and diligently to be a servant to her God. She believes in being a good woman. A good wife, a good mother, a good daughter, a good friend, a good child of God. And she is seeing that the meaning of being good can shift and the goodness in that is even better. She isn’t 10 anymore, or even 35.
What she is now is 57, planning a wedding with her daughter, feeding her mother in the nursing home, painting a Sky Ceiling and working in the roses. When she talks about her roses, she looks ageless. A peace comes into her eyes that reflects the Wise Woman. Quietly, the story she tells is that everyday she goes into the roses, twenty of them, and one by one, slowly and carefully she checks them. The first round is looking for black spot mold, taking off any leaf or petal that shows the evidence. The second round is clipping back whatever has come into the time to be pruned. The third round is feeding the roses, working the food into the soil, carefully, rose bush by rose bush, nourishing all twenty. And finally, the fourth round is cutting the roses that come into the house that day, the roses that have been noticed in the other rounds and will bring the beauty of the garden into the house. This woman doesn’t wear a hat when she works in her roses. She doesn’t like hats. She does wear an old basketball shirt, blue with a famous player’s picture and name on it, and she does get dirty and very sweaty in the Florida summer heat. And finally, when she comes back into her house wet and dirty, carrying roses, she fully knows her blessings. That one day, slim and lythe, she skied down the snowy slopes in a lime green ski outfit, that now she is painting a Sky Ceiling in her bedroom and that every day, every day she works in the roses.
