Scotch Rose

I realize as an adult that the roses I knew as "wild" roses growing up on the shores of the Bay of Fundy were actually Rugosas. When my mother was a little girl, "wild" roses were actually naturalized Scotch roses like this one (Courtesy of Wikipedia):

Was there some overlap? Were there some Scotch roses around when I was a kid? There were. The funny thing is that the twelve year old me was more knowledgeable about these things that I am now. He could identify a whole raft of wild flowers and would have unhesitatingly remembered whether or not the ones on the way down to the beach were Scotch roses or not.

At any rate, by the time I was twelve, escaped Rugosas were well-established down the eastern seaboard but not yet an invasive species. It was considered a blessing to find one. The Scotch roses were different because you usually found them where their used to be a garden. If you looked around the area where you found one there was often a foundation where a farmhouse used to be.

As I say, there were some on the way down to the beach from the place where we used to summer. They might easily have been Scotch roses because the hill side was always eroding and occasionally reclaiming cottages that stood on the hill. It's not hard to imagine a garden rose successfully clinging while the cottage it belonged to was swept away. Whatever type they were, these were growing in an open space by the trail on the way down. They were almost overgrown by raspberries.

It seems like a story someone would tell now and I suppose it is because I'm telling it. Not a specific story. A general story:

"I remember how much fun it was to hang around the beach with all my cousins. We'd swim until we were so cold we couldn't swim anymore. Then we'd get out and sit in the sun until were were so hot we had to go swimming again. Eventually we'd be so tired from this that we'd wander back to the cottage. It was a long hill, maybe 150 feet vertical, and we'd take our time. In the grasses near the edge of the balsam fir stands, there might be blueberries. Higher up there were raspberries and sometimes roses. You could take a long time working your way back like that shouting out, "I found some," to cousins and sisters further ahead or behind on the trail. My sister CK was always best at finding them."

You could retell it as a less pleasant story if you wanted to. It was a rocky beach and the water was pretty cold. No one swims there now because it's too cold for current tastes. Windsurfers in wetsuits are the only people who go in the water nowadays. We used to beg to be allowed to go from May 'til September. And that hill, you could get awful hot climbing that hill.

One of the reasons the memory of that story is so magic now is because I was taught the joyous version of the story as I lived it. My mother taught me to enjoy that experience. It was when we kids came up that path with her and she'd find a rose, a blueberry or a raspberry and she'd respond as to a great treat that I learned that story. She lived that story of walking up that path as a wonderful adventure so we did too. And I can still do it today.

That was something a lot of mothers did. Going to the back corner of the yard and sitting on a blanket and having a picnic you could have just as easily had at the kitchen table a few yards away was an adventure because your mother experienced it as an adventure.

By the time you're thirteen this sort of experience becomes an embarrassment if you see it through your friends' eyes. I never got so jaded that I stopped enjoying it entirely though. And there always were times when you could still do it without reserve; while on family vacations for example.

Toward the end of her life—when she already knew that the cancer was going to kill her but she had not yet told the rest of us—we went to an old country cemetery together. It was all overgrown with tall grasses but over on the side there was a clump of blueberries. I picked some but she wasn't interested in that adventure anymore. She was more interested in showing me some graves of family members that no one remembered anymore.

I picked the blueberries anyway and ate them in the car driving back. They were lowbush blueberries. My mother always told us that they were the best. That was why they were worth looking for  even though you had to crouch down until it hurt and the berries were much smaller so it took much longer to pick a pie.

She never complained that we kids usually ate a pies' worth picking that pie. The important thing was to learn to live that story.