Think of its texture, now, think of its colour. Think of your surprise as its scent reached your nose and stirred up your memories. Think of the last time when basked in a warm sunshine, you stopped by a trail in the forest, by the alley in your garden and buried your nose in a rose flower. Velvet white bouquets crowing the statue of the Virgin Mary as it walks through the streets of a dusking Paris. The rose petals falling like garnet teardrops on the white marble floor of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque and the scent of rosewater washing the stone courtyards of the Damascus of old. I remember their scent carried by the saline breeze and the wafts of linden blossoms mingling in their trail.
I remember the roses growing wild in a Balinese garden and the grandiose ones blooming in the Isle of Flowers off the coast of Brittany amidst bursts of laughter and the playful eyes of running children. I have memory of the roses in my mum’s garden, round and plump, pink and yellow and some there were also white as snow.
I have the memory of a dewy rose I smelt in a garden by the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the dunes and the pine trees in a cold morning of pale spring.
There’s A River in My Head © Isabelle Menin, 2014įor I have memory not of one but of countless roses. Was she right? Gertrude Stein, was she right when she wrote that “Rose is a rose” that a rose is a rose? That all is as it seems, that we are what we are? Was she right in assuming that… a rose is a rose?