1.
Perennial
Lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring
—OED Online
Since moving to New York a few years ago, my mornings have become about keeping time or being on time. I wake up at 6:00am, go to the gym at 7:00am, get back home at 8:00am, shower at 8:10am, drink a cup of coffee 8:30am, get ready at 8:45am, and leave my apartment at 9:15am. I walk the same route each morning turning left once I am out the house, then a slight right at the end of the road and then left again where I finally arrive at the subway station ten minutes later. These walks to the subway station are mindless, a kind of muscle memory that moves my body from my apartment to the train. Even on the days when I am running late, my body drives into autopilot picking up my walking pace so I can make it on time. Yet, each year around spring, my time keeping is disrupted by what often seems like a sudden appearance of a rosebush in full bloom. Suddenly time slows down as I stop to look at these roses, to witness this rebirth. Without fail, I always attempt to take a picture of these roses – an attempt that’s filled up my camera roll over the years – and then I stare at them in awe for a few minutes before moving on. As I walk away, I wonder how I don’t remember anything about my walks to the station or even this street that I’ve walked down for the past months up until this moment when the earth feels like it’s coming back to life again.
Over the years, I’ve become intrigued by this bush which propelled me to learn more about roses. A rose, I found, is a woody perennial flowering plant of the genus Rosa. In botany, perennial plants are plants that live for more than two years. There are over three hundred species of roses, many of which can live for 50 years or more with the right care. Perennials grow and bloom over the spring and summer, die back every autumn and winter, and then return in the spring from their rootstock— the underground part of a plant, from which new above-ground growth can be produced.1 In fact, all plants create complex 3D structures of their roots, known as root system architecture, that are determined by a combination of genetic makeup and how they respond to environmental cues like soil conditions and water availability.2 It has been five years since I first encountered the rosebush in my neighbourhood, which lives in front of a 100+ year old brownstone. I wonder what its root system looks like, how deep or wide do they run? There is so much more to life than what we can see.
2.
Tend
To care for or look after; give one's attention to.
—OED Online
One of my earliest memories is of my father tending to his garden but I had to confirm if this memory was in fact real or made up with my mother. She tells me that while he generally loved gardening and farming, roses were his passion. He taught himself everything about soil, pH levels, watering schedules, stem propagation and even the best manure, which acts as a natural fertilizer, for roses – I can never forget the smell of fresh manure as a result. Although gardening certainly was his passion, he didn’t get to spend a lot of time in it as he worked as a pilot, which meant that he was rarely at home for more than two weeks every month. When he was away at work, he would leave instructions on how to care for his roses and when he’d return, my mum tells me that he would complain that his instructions weren’t followed with his precision.
Although my father wasn’t a physically affectionate person, what I remember, in this memory of him in his garden, is how soft and tender he was while tending to his roses. Looking back, I wonder what this tending did for him. I wonder if it undid in him, if even for a short while, this sense of measured time. After spending so many years working, perhaps at times on autopilot, logging flight times, landing times, take off, crossing time, I wonder if it gave him a sense of his own time. In his poem, Loitering is Delightful Ross Gay writes, “Taking one’s time is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.”3 My engagement with Gay’s work goes back a while. Long before this invitation to write this piece, I’ve returned to his writing, reading his poems and essays over and over again. Recently, I found a few sentences that I had transcribed from something that Gay said:
How you see, or what you see depends on the ground. You cannot engrave in other words, you cannot dig in other words, you cannot prepare the earth for your body without a proper and true ground. Maybe this book of flowers is a preparation for the ground I wish to enter.
I cannot source where Gay said this, if it was part of one of his poems or essays, or if it’s from something that he said during a talk. But it was the first note that I saw a few months ago in my notebook, that’s full of many notes, as if it were waiting for me to find it. I read it a few times and thought about my father tending to his rose – tending so carefully to that which will inevitably die. And I thought about how fitting it was that we laid a bed of roses on his grave eight years ago when he passed away.
From the earth We created you, and into it We will return you, and from it We will bring you back again.
—Quran 20:55
According to Islamic faith, Muslims should be buried within three days of death as the body is meant to decompose naturally in the ground. Following a death, a set of rituals involving cleaning the body followed by shrouding it in white cotton fabric are to be performed before the burial in order to prepare the dead for the afterlife. I only learned about these rituals when my sister passed away about a year ago because they are to be performed by family members of the same sex. After the cleaning, the body is wrapped in white cotton fabric and a perfume oil – which I later learn is called attar – is applied all over the fabric. Attar is a natural perfume oil that’s extracted from herbs, blooming flowers, spice, and barks. In Islamic folklore, attars are thought to attract angels and ward off evil spirits.4 The attar we use on the fabric that cloaked my sister’s body was made of jasmine and rose.
As with other religions, Islamic customs have different regional interpretations but what remains common among them is that death is seen not as the termination of life, rather the continuation of life in another form. Rather than using a coffin to bury, the body is placed on pieces of wood directly on the ground and those present at the burial site are asked to pour three handfuls of soil while reciting the verse: From this very earth We created you and to the same From the earth We created you, and into it We will return you, and from it We will bring you back again. In some cultures, flowers are scattered and rosewater is poured on the grave.
For Muslims, life on earth is considered to be a preparation ground for the afterlife. Here I return to Ross Gay’s words, his preparation for the ground he wishes to enter. I think about these funeral rituals that tend so carefully to the body. Tending to that which will return again albeit unseen to us. I think about my returning to the rosebush each year, for which my mother suggests is a subconscious return to my father. Yesterday she sent a photo of roses that she had just laid on my father and sister’s graves.