White Rose

Dedicated to the love of my life, the loss of my father and their redolent shades of intimacy

Floriography White Rosebud – heart ignorant of love
White Rose – innocence, purity, secrecy, silence, worthiness, heavenliness
Purple Thistle – nobility
Aniseed – restoration of youth
Blue Violet – I’ll always be true, modesty
White Violet – let’s take a chance
Jonquil – love me, desire for affection returned

I lay down in my garden at a pensive moment to reminisce. Flowers gather behind my closed lids caught into a bouquet, a tussie-mussie, each one capturing a time and a place redolent with meaning. And in the centre, a white rose.

“Elizabeth, our white rose,” my father whispers to me in intimacy, innocent at birth, ignorant of love, and again throughout my childhood. He is a sagacious yet passionate man of words. A wise, kind man. White roses lay on his coffin years later. A white rose is engraved on his headstone, discordant with his being English and buried at the Australian seaside. Sand dunes not green hills rise close by. It is a desolate loss echoed by the landscape.

Our new English dollshouse stands strangely noble in a barren landscape. The only house. But it is a home full of love, kindness, warmth and laughter. I stare from my window at the massed expanse of purple scotch thistles reaching to the trestle bridge. The train rattles across it daily travelling to Sydney. I imagine the lives and loves of the people on there. I say one day I will go too and have a life like theirs.

The thistles rise to my shoulders. I walk along the pathway worn by strangely familiar footprints as yet unexplained. I stand beneath the bridge where aniseed grows, listening to the train above asking me to travel from my childhood towards my love. He wanders there, searching, nineteen years before and pauses, slightly quizzical, wondering, before continuing his journey.

After my father is gone I search for lost intimacy, kind wisdom. Yet in that loss is hope and understanding.

I meet my love. There are flowers in my heart. He speaks in a floral language that gathers our souls together. His words are as flowers to me, arranged carefully and fragranced with meaning. I respond by taking him violets, jonquils and aniseed. Before leaving he pauses like years before, “I was barren. I want to thank you. I have been wondering how to nurture our intimacy?” He echoes and questions the shared landscape of our childhood.

Yet implicit in that sought after, treasured intimacy is greater loss, more keenly anticipated with experience. Such love flowers only once, its recognition born from my father’s love. He showed me the way. It was in his eyes, his voice, as he whispered of the white rose.

The white rose has become all the more poignant intimating the silence and secrecy of lovers, innocence and purity replaced by worthiness and heavenliness. They bloom in my lover’s eyes and voice.

Kind words and wisdom mingled with the language of flowers. They are a most beautiful way to know of love, loss and intimacy.

Lizzie