LEGACY OF ANCESTORS BLOOMS LIKE A ROSE

There is a rose blooming in our back yard.

It is a yellow rose, a rambler, a common rose, the kind often found growing unpruned in graveyards or at abandoned homesteads.

Right now, it has a hundred beautiful blossoms.

This rose and the one beside it are special.

The yellow rose came from my wife's hometown. It had grown wild for 30 years next to her dad's warehouse. We call it the Garton rose in his honor.

With the help of a neighbor, my wife dug up a piece of the rose with the root. She brought it home to the Valley and we planted it.

We watched it closely the first year, hoping it would survive. It did. There were a few leaves, but mostly it was just the rooted stick.

Late the year before last, we saw a new stem pop through the ground, then another and another.

Last year, there were several blooms.

This year, in full glory, it looks as it did when she was a girl.

But now it is in our yard, where she can show it to the grandchildren and tell them about a great-grandfather they never knew.

As both a historian and a genealogist, I know that artifacts are important.

As a father and an adult who has had to find his way in the world, I have discovered that stories about the past are defining. What we are told by and about our forebears often help determine who and what we are.

If we are lucky, there are pictures, quilt tops or rocking chairs around which the lives of those who came before can be described.

These objects become symbols of the values in a family.

We can understand what drove those before to do what they did and what might be driving us.

The Garton rose, for six grandchildren, will come to represent the qualities of humor, kindness and love of the outdoors, embodying the gifts that a great-grandfather gives to those born long after his death.

Beside the Garton rose is another. We don't know the color of the blooms yet because it was planted last year.

Like the yellow rose, it is an artifact buzzing with remembrances along with the bees.

We found it in a hay field on Whiskey Creek, southwest of Dayton, Wash.

It had been mowed off three or four times a year, but had continued to come back.

We visited the hay field because it was the site of my wife's family homestead, claimed first in 1876.

Looking for where the house might have been, we found the rose bush.

Because of the yellow rose, we dug the Whiskey Creek rose out of the ground and transplanted it to our back yard.

As their granny shows them that rose, the grandchildren will be told of a family that endured the challenges of farming on the frontier, struggling through drought and the depressions of 1893 and the 1930s.

They will learn about a great-great-grandmother who, along with her mother and sisters, worked in the searing heat of a cookwagon while the grain was being harvested and threshed.

They will come to know of four brothers who farmed leased lands with their mother after the Whiskey Creek place was lost.

The rose will represent, for these children, a family tradition of hard work and of working together, each contributing what they could.

In the midst of the columbines, veronicas, daisies and other plants that grace our yard, these two old roses thrive.

As individual plants, they are ancient in rose time, no less than 50 years old and perhaps more than a century.

Their importance, though, is not so much as residents of a flower bed, but as containers of memory.

These flowers hold the stories of a family and the people in it. They describe the past. They live in the present.

They provide six grandchildren a way to learn the ideals of a family and bring them into the future.

Copyright 1999 Cowles Publishing Company
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.