Agnes May and Myrtle Jean are blooming now. Three years ago they were bought as stumpy little excuses for rose bushes and named after my deceased grandmothers. They, the roses, not my grandmothers, were each no more than a foot high, had a root structure, a few thorns and not much more.
The thorny version of grandma Myrtle Jean is mauve, the colour of Myrtle Jean's hair. My father would call my grandmother Myrtle the Turtle. There was the Sunday drives with Mum in passenger seat and my sister and I in back where Myrtle Jean would squeeze in and watch out the window with us as the world passed by.
We'd head off from home to collect her in the car for those drives, park beside her unit—the humble two bedroom place that she was so proud of, with perfectly prunes roses, hanging baskets and a small mown lawn. Mum would run in to get her. "Mur-tle the Tur-tle," Dad would goad us in a funny voice that sounded part swami, part cartoon animal. And we'd piss ourselves in the back seat, thin tanned limbs wound in seat belts waiting for Myrtle the Turtle to huddle in, ready to take a drive by the ocean, visit a few play grounds and get soft serve ice cream from the Mr Whippy van.
Agnes May, the rose, not the woman, was meant to be red. In life the woman kept dusty plastic plants around her home and collected silver charms and hotel soaps from around the world. Agnes May was five foot nothing, rotund and flamboyant with crimson nails, leopard print shoes and costume jewelery (that now finds its way onto my fingers and wrists).
A year an a half ago my grandmother, Agnes May, made her presence known in a meditation — there she was softer than she had been in life and she handed me a light-yellow coloured rose.
Sure enough when Agnes May The Rose bloomed she was yellow. True to the woman's nature, that bush defied its tag, still attached, wound around a branch—a picture of a flourishing bush with crimson coloured blossoms never to be.
It's taken years for the ladies to blossom. Some rather crappy soil hasn't helped and my half hearted attempts to placate it with fertiliser might have assisted a little.
There was the pruning I did, learned from my father when I was younger. I watched him tend his roses out the front that were the envy of our neighbours on the cul-de-sac lined with brown brick houses. Watching him, I learned to trim off the unneeded bits, strengthen the core, leave room for the little nubs to grow into new branches.
I have Agnes May's flamboyant rings gathered in my dresser drawer. Myrtle Jean's crochet needles sit in a small simple tin, decorated with images of China men, which she might have bought on that trip to Singapore she saved so hard for.
Agnes May had clutched her heart in the next room as my sister and I sat by the coffee table with crayons making Get Well Cards that we never got to hand her. We looked up from our drawing and watched as my father closed the sliding doors.
Myrtle Jean passed away smelling of Cashmere Bouquet powder, remembering only her youth, thinking me the cleaning lady.
Yet somehow in my poor excuse for a garden these women bloom, making their presence known. I am now an age almost half theirs when they left this world, old enough to know better. Old enough now to hear the lessons grandmothers teach little ones. Old enough to understand that getting ones hands in the dirt provides good grounding, pruning makes one stronger, labels need not matter and poor soil is no excuse for a lack of growth.
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