As I have hiked up to the mailbox every morning, the wildroses blooming along the driveway have increased in beauty and number. As I said before, the smell of them is a direct link to the past...all of the summers of childhood when the roses crowded the lanes and driveways. Sharp, dark pink buds open to five-petaled flowers with multiplicitous stamens circling the center. Then, as the petals fall away they leave a slender star that crowns the burgeoning hip that grows behind it.
My mother reminds me that Wildrose is the name of the desert canyon near Death Valley where her family ran a resort in the thirties and forties. It has been gone for a number of years now, but about fourteen years ago we took a road trip with our boys and my parents through that area and stopped at the old site. My mother brought photos from her childhood so we were able to stand on the spot and see exactly what had been there. There were pictures of my aunts and uncle, and one wonderful one of my grandmother holding court in the outdoor patio, playing her guitar and singing amongst a group of visitors. One of the people who came to sing with Mimi was a ranger from Death Valley National Monument called Stan Jones. He wrote "Ghost Riders in the Sky", a song that became quite popular, and the family story is that he sang it first there at Wildrose with our grandmother.
There is quite a difference in the landscape of the San Juan Islands and the Mojave Desert where my mother and I were born, but one common thread is the presence of wild roses.