I thought I killed it.

Sometimes when I try to make something better, it gets worse. My error in those situations is misdiagnosing the possibility of improvement. I fail to understand that the task isn’t fixing something lousy but accepting it. It’s not going to get better. Time to move forward. The usual setting for this mistake is interpersonal relationships. But sometimes it’s gardening.

To mark five months of sobriety (an event that happened 51 months ago), I bought myself a Rainbow Niagara rose plant. It was spendy and somewhat impulsive – I just was taken by the yellow-orange flowers. In addition to being five months into sobriety, I was about one month into a job where I was making a lot more money. I was fifteen months into home ownership, of a formerly vacant house, and still cleaning up the garden. Every month for the first year of my sobriety, I rewarded myself with something. Having an item that would grow and develop seemed like a good way to mark the achievement.

And then I proceeded to put it in a part of the yard that would become more and more shaded as time went on. The rose needs about six hours of direct sunlight. It did not receive it. Needless to say, while the rose had some blooms every year, it never really met its full potential.

Every gardener screws something up. Having a sense of humor is a prerequisite if you get into cultivating any living thing. However, it was feeling particularly rough to have not just a plant languishing, but a metaphor too. My husband suggested it was fine enough, if I moved it, I might kill it.

My church has a services auction every year where people volunteer the most random things (art, parties, educational sessions, and more) and donate the proceeds to the church. It is my most favorite fundraiser. I won a garden consultation by our absolutely lovely garden committee chair who is as wonderful a person as she is an effective gardener. If you find yourself on the corner of Elmwood and West Ferry, seriously, check out the church’s gardens. They are beautiful.

She took a look at our yard and gardens and gave us fantastic advice, including a way to create a new garden in my front yard. Some day I’d like the entire front yard to be garden. But for now, she gave me a sense of how to create more and make it look nice.

So, one day, in June, when I really should have been working on the bathroom, I dug up sod in a sunny part of the yard and also dug out the giant rocks of concrete from the house that used to be there, and made a new garden. I planted a new knock out rose whose bright fuscia enchanted me, and then I transplanted a soft pink floribunda rose that the kids gave me some years ago for Mother’s Day. It wasn’t doing well next to the porch. I then dug out the Sobriety Rose to transplant as well. Except I failed to get the whole root of that rose, hearing a snap.

My heart sank.

You always bake your bread and you always plant the plants, hoping that Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park was right: life finds a way.

The Sobriety Rose withered. The others thrived.

I added water every day, knowing the roots it was working with were rough. After a good rainstorm, the leaves had some pep. But mostly they looked dry and withered. Some of the stems outright died. I kept watering it, hoping that maybe if the other persisted, there’s be some hope for next season. Next season is usually the best one for transplants. It never looks fully right the first season. It also usually doesn’t look as dead.

Most of the summer it looked like this was turning into a metaphor for my habit of trying to over-fix things. It wasn’t dead yet, so I kept caring for it.

Then, in mid August, it started a new growth. …Oh!

Early September, I noticed there was a lone bud on this rose. Usually the rose bloomed in summer, this was late, but this also was real.

Yesterday, it was in full bloom.

I thought this rose was going to turn into a metaphor for overworking circumstances. Instead it is, tentatively, looking like a metaphor of how trying to make better circumstances is not infrequently a rough struggle of adapting, struggling, and sometimes suffering. If you stick with it, you can improve, and things can be better. But you have to struggle through the change. That was the actual experience of living into sobriety. Now it feels normal. At the time I was changing my habits, I had to cope with why I was drinking too regularly in the first place, feel the feelings I was avoiding, and find new ways to be. The fact a pandemic started two months after I quit drinking was not particularly fun. Ultimately, I got where I needed to go. It is a better place than where I was before.

I am hoping this rose survives the winter and in the years ahead, finds this new spot better for its thriving. The hope of something better is why we pursue change.