Last Roses of Summer

The last roses of summer bloom beside my house. They bask under the early autumn sun, more yellow now than they ever became during the hot, dry days of summer, and their perfume is sweet. They summon to mind this poignant metaphor from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard:

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

But the metaphor only works if the desert is a wasteland. Readers of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire know a different desert: not a wasteland, but a different world. Dewey Bunnell tried to capture the essence of that world when he wrote A Horse With No Name: “There were plants and birds and rocks and things … There was sand and hills and rings ...”

Besides, flowers don’t bloom for our benefit. They have their own reasons.