manrymission.com

I gave Mountaineer Mary a tour of my roses when she stopped by during a run to refill her water bottle. After her tour, she asked me how many roses I had. I was afraid to count.

Today, I counted. I have 35 roses. Admittedly, that’s a bit crazy, but I have found a full proof way to feel better about myself. Whenever I realize I’m slipping over the edge into crazyness, I go to see someone crazier than myself.

A few Sundays ago, Abby, Fearless Leader Mary, and I went to the 2012 open garden day at the crazy rose lady’s house. The crazy rose lady has 800+ roses. Therefore, I’ve got a long way to go until I’m a crazy rose lady.

Dale may disagree with that statement.

Abby took all the rose pictures at the garden, and she got some great shots. I approach the Hartwood Rose garden like a treasure hunt. There are roses of every shape, size, and color fighting for survival. It is fun to scramble about looking for a rose I’ve never seen before and may never see again. The sheer scale of the roses and the sheer number of blooms is an amazing sight to behold.

It’s a great day with only one draw back: my list of “I should get that rose” grows longer and longer and longer.

Thanks to Mr. Shaw’s legacy, my garden during March and April is full of lovely spring blooming flowers, shrubs, and trees. When Mr. Shaw sold me his garden and Dale his house, he left me with one rose. The rose didn’t bloom well because of too little sun. My memory told me the one time I saw it bloom, it had red flowers. After the pear tree accident created a new garden bed, I dug the rose up and moved it in the middle of the hot dry summer. My neighbor was convinced I had killed it and it did look almost dead. However, the next May it bloomed hot pink and close to the ground. It had tricked me, it was a flower carpet rose. I dug it up again that summer and moved it to cover an old stump near the back patio, a much more appropriate spot for its ground hugging nature. It looked mostly dead that summer as well, but the next spring it was once again happy and bloomed in all its hot pink gaudiness.

That’s how it started, with a relocated rose that required buckets of water and periodic pep talks on why it shouldn’t die. The next step towards rose madness was Dale’s anniversary gift to me of roses planted in front of the porch: two Fourth of July climbing roses and a Sally Homes rose. They have been there for four years and are finally growing towards their potential, even though they do not get quite enough sun. Soon, I started buying roses in bags or as bare roots and planting them here there and everywhere. Some lived, some died. I water, fertilize, prune, and periodically weed, but I do not spray for insects or disease. I do not pamper my plants. Now that I think about it, I do not pamper anything. My husband, my kids, my pets, my plants: It’s all a bit of survival of the fittest around here.

However, I decided if I was more educated on roses, I would make better choices and have a higher rose survival rate. I read books from the library, I visited rose gardens and asked questions, I read comments online. I learned about rose cuttings at a local historic home. I started buying roses grown on their own roots instead of grafted roses. I chose varieties known for disease resistance especially against blackspot which we have in abundance in Virginia. I tried to be sensible, but then the form, color, or scent of a particular rose will begin to entice me. “Look how healthy it looks sitting here in the greenhouse or on the computer,” I tell myself full well knowing it has been treated to the max and grown in idyllic conditions. I know all its accolades are too good to be true for someone who provides only spotty care. Often, I buy it and regret it. When I grow irritated with a particular rose because it is full of disease and won’t bloom well, I move it into the bed of despair behind the sun room where only ditch lilies grow in profusion.

Over the course of these last four years of rose growing, I have discovered I am not very good at growing the tea roses one would buy in a bouquet from a florist. I love them for their form and scent, but they need too much work and I am too lazy.

I am fond of my hybrid musk roses: Sally Holmes (peach to white) and Belinda (bright pink). My most reliable roses are my Rainbow Knockout (pink and yellow), Canadian Explorer Champlain (red), climbing miniature Jeanne Lajoie (light pink), and floribunda Betty Prior (deep pink). I also grow a few good shrub roses: Home Run (bright red), and – my kid’s favorite – Black Ice (dark red). I love my hybrid perpetual rose Sidonie (pink) for its beautiful scented flower.

This year I had success with two purple roses: the rambler Veilchenbleu and the centifolia The Bishop. My climbing Fourth of July roses (Red with yellow and white stripes) always make me smile when they bloom, but they get blackspot afterwards. Last year, I planted the rambler New Dawn (silver pink). It is a huge rose. If you have a fence or wall to cover, it can’t be beat.

Dale likes to purchase strange colored roses for me to plant. The strangest one is the floribunda Cinco de Mayo (smoke and rust). It clashes with everything and hurts my eyes, but it’s sure to grab your attention.

Yes, I have a lot of roses. Yes, I have gone a bit rose crazy. Many of my roses have not proven their worth. I fear to make a list of those that have died or been relegated to the bed of despair.

The one rose I would recommend everyone grow is the shrub rose Quietness (light pink). The bush has a nice form and the flowers are traditionally tea shaped with a light scent. It has proven resistant to disease and quite hardy. It brings quietness to the chaos of my garden and encourages me to stop planting, debating, hurrying, and scurrying. Quietness always reminds me to stop for a bit and enjoy God’s creation.

Here’s Zeke getting a single:

A few action shots worthy of baseball cards:

From the time Zeke started speaking, he started wishing

“I wish I could go to daycare,” he told me when he was a toddler.

“I wish I could stay all day at school,” he told me as a Kindergartener.

“I wish I could stay for after care,” he told me last week.

Most of his wishes change as the days go by, but one wish never changed.

“I wish I could play baseball,” he said to me for three years straight.

Josiah played baseball. Josiah played soccer. Josiah practiced karate. Josiah is the first child. First children get to do many things. Second children get to do several things. Third children get to do a few things. Fourth children sit and wish they could do something.

As another baseball season approached, Zeke decided he needed an ally. He talked to his teacher, Mrs. Wright. Mrs. Wright loves sports and all things Virginia Tech. She has a daughter in softball and a daughter in soccer. At the parent teacher conference, she said “Zeke told me he wanted to play baseball.”

“Yep,” I replied, “And if he didn’t have such a lazy mother, he would be playing.”

“Stafford has a really good baseball league,” she assured me.

In February, Zeke came home and said, “Mrs. Wright wanted me to tell you that baseball signups are happening right now.”

I called a friend and asked her the lowdown on the machine pitch rookie league. She assured me it was just to teach the kids the fundamentals. No one kept score. Each batter on the team got five balls pitched to them. Every kid took turns playing each position. There was no intense pressure and competition.

Finally, we signed Zeke up.

Dale gave Zeke Josiah’s old glove and took him to his first practice.

“O.K. boys, put on your helmets.” the coach called out.  Zeke had no helmet.

“O.K. boys, get your bats,” said the coach. Zeke had no bat.

The days of showing up to play baseball with only a glove are over. The coach does not have a giant bag of bats and helmets that the team uses. All the other boys at practice had a baseball bag with a bat, helmet, and glove.

The next day, Zeke and I went shopping.

God had heard Zeke’s three years of wishes and prayers and blessed him with a terrific coach. Coach Bill had recently moved from Texas. “In Texas,” he said, “They have a league wide draft for three year olds.”

He was glad to leave that level of sports crazy, but he brought with him excellent techniques on how to teach beginners to field, throw, and hit. Zeke’s practices were full of drills: Kids in varying parts of the field, working with different assistant coaches on baseball skills. It was like a baseball camp.

After several weeks of practices, the team started to play games and the benefit of our coach became obvious. Each hitter was worked with as Coach Bill pitched to him. He had them adjust their feet, elbows, and hip stance. He adjusted the machine so the ball stayed in their strike zone. He talked and coached and encouraged and got each kid to stand in there and believe they could hit the ball.

All the kids but one got a hit sometime during the first two games. The coach kept working with each of them and especially with the boy who had not yet gotten a hit. Every time he got up to bat, everyone was hoping and praying for him. In the third game, when he finally got a hit, a roar went up from the team, coaches, and parents. We all cheered and cheered and cheered.

Zeke is a good hitter. He was 4 for 4 in his first game. All those days of pitching a wiffle ball or tennis ball at him while he stood, bat in hand, on the driveway paid off. He hustles around the bases well, but his fielding and throwing still needs some work.

Last night, Mrs Wright came to see Zeke play. He fielded the ball in center field and threw out a kid running to second, and he was 3 for 3 at bat. The team batted the entire lineup during two of the innings. It was a beautiful sunny day to watch baseball.

However, the game prior was cold, windy, and rainy. Part way through the game, the coach’s wife drove to Wawa and brought her husband back a hot cup of coffee. Observing this, Dale gave me a look and pointed at her to see if I was paying attention.

“I wish I could have some coffee,” he said.

“Can’t you see I’m watching a game here?” I asked.

Dale, Josiah, and I conducted college visit #6 last weekend. We went to the college of William and Mary. It is the second oldest college in the US. (Harvard is first.) While UVA can claim Thomas Jefferson as their founder, William and Mary claims Thomas Jefferson as a student. Prior to our college search process, Dale and I thought William and Mary was a private school.

William and Mary (W&M) is a beautiful place. It is located adjacent to historic downtown Williamsburg and the old brick buildings and cobblestone walkways transport you to a time long ago. It has beautiful grounds with large old trees and lawns. The buildings are old brick on the outside, but many are nicely renovated on the inside.

The Sadler building on campus housed a pleasant dining hall and a number of fun lounge areas to hang out in. One lounge area had pool, air hockey, and foosball tables along with a skeeball machine. I was quite impressed with the skeeball machine. Here I am walking around a historic campus, and all I can think is “Wow! They got a skeeball machine!”

One lounge area had a stage for student musicians to set up on and entertain the crowd. There was a piano on it, so Dale told Josiah to put out a hat and start playing.

We were shown inside an academic building but not a classroom and a dorm building but not a dorm room. The dorms were not as decrepit as UVA or as nice as CNU. At W&M there are not enough dorm rooms for all the students. After freshman year, getting housing is similar to being on an overbooked flight waiting to see if you get bumped.

Our tour guide told us of the great lengths she went to guarantee a place to live. After freshman year, she signed up for a language immersion dorm in which all the students who live in the dorm communicate in Chinese. (She was of Chinese heritage.) The College has Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish dorms also. For Junior and Senior year, she joined a sorority. All sorority and fraternity housing is on campus. I have always wondered why people join sororities and fraternities. This was the first time someone told me it was to guarantee she’d have a place to live.

The library has massage chairs for all the stressed out double majoring students. Achievement is a primary focus at the college.

Because of this striving for achievement, there are some once in a lifetime opportunities at W&M. One program allows you to study two years at William and Mary and two years at Saint Andrews in Scotland. Each year, twenty students are accepted into the program in the areas of economics, history, international relations, and English. The students who complete the program graduate with a diploma from both universities.

The W&M mascot is now a griffin (mythical creature with the body of a lion: King William’s coat of arms, and the head of an eagle: US national bird) W&M used to have a Native American mascot, but the NCAA ruled that all colleges had to change mascots that may be considered offensive to Native Americans. However,  the students still refer to themselves as the tribe.

Thankfully, during our tour, we heard no stories of secret societies with hooded robes or pitchforks. The most amusing tale concerned the bridge across the pond on campus. It involves many tales not to be believed. “If you walk across it alone, you will remain unmarried for life.” “If you walk across it with friends, you will be friends for life.” “If you kiss someone while standing on the bridge, you will marry that person.”

This, of course, brought up the subject of what counter actions a girl had to take if she decided afterwards not to marry the guy. Our tour guide suggested the girl would have to throw the guy off the bridge. Dale suggested that if a guy was stuck in a “kissing on the bridge destiny” that he wanted to escape, he should jump from the bridge and swim to freedom with the turtles.