I asked Kristina, “What can I do to help?”

She said, “You could prune the rosebush.”

So I went downstairs, got my leather gloves and little pruning clippers by the door, and went out to the garden and the back of the house.

It’s my rosebush now. I’ve claimed it, and we’ve become close friends.

I talk to it. It responds. It nods gently in the breeze.

Mostly I dead-head the roses. That’s when you take the stem of what used to be a rose after the petals fall off and the head and stem turn brown and brittle and you break it at the point where the brown meets green and it snaps right off.

Then I toss it or drop it down where they gather and I’ll pick them up later and put them in the green trash can which is staged and standing [see what I did there? “staged and standing”. One of those instances where I have to choose a word, try the variations, and settle for using both, which you sometimes have to do as a writer] there at the back of the house.

I love my rosebush and it loves me back. When I work myself in to get to the inner branches, the outer branches hug me and the thorns don’t want to let me go.

When my rosebush droops to tell me it’s hungry and thirsty, I bring it what it needs and it perks back up. That’s how I know it loves me, that, and the blooms, which it blossoms in cycles as the old and the dead drop off and already I can see the little new babies starting.

Whenever we go someplace in the car and come back, the rosebush welcomes me home. It says, “I’m here for you, blooming as much as I can.”

The last time we came home I got a terrible shock. The gardeners had come and flat-topped my rosebush.

It wasn’t the same. All those upper branches reaching in aspiration and blooming, blooming, were gone and stunted like my life.

At least it’s still here, still trying and blooming, my life.