My mother loved roses.
She always wanted to grow them, but when we were growing up in Florida, roses weren't particularly happy in the heat - and Mom didn't have much time for tending a rose garden anyway.
She worked too hard for that.
So she settled for hibiscus bushes in our yard.
Mom worked constantly to support us, and whenever there was a job where she could bring her children along, we worked too. She believed deeply in teaching us the value of hard work - not by talking about it, but by expecting us to work right beside her.
For a time, she managed a St. Petersburg Times substation. Newspapers arrived in sections, and we helped insert them, putting all the pages together in the proper order. My sister helped the drivers deliver papers while the younger kids stayed at the substation working with Mom.
We delivered advertisements too, going from house to house and hanging flyers on people's doorknobs.
When Mom decided to build our swimming pool, even that became a family project.
A house was being torn down, and Mom saw something useful in what other people were throwing away. She took us there to collect the old bricks. We brought them home and chiseled the cement from them so they could be reused to build our pool.
I was in first grade.
I'd come home and chisel cement from bricks until it was time for dinner.
That was Mom.
But there was another side of her too.
She had an excellent singing voice. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she sang with the Sweet Adelines. She also sang at church, where she faithfully attended on Wednesdays and Sundays.
And she loved children.
After her own children were grown, Mom began another chapter. She moved to North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where she earned her degree in Psychology. Going back to college after raising her children was another example of her determination to begin a new chapter in her life, turning her love of children and her instinct to care for others into the work she chose for herself.
And in North Carolina, something else finally happened.
Mom got her roses.
After all those years of working, raising children, and putting so much of herself into everyone around her, she finally had a rose garden of her own.
That's why I chose roses for this collection.
They remind me of the woman who taught us to work hard, who could see a swimming pool in a pile of discarded bricks, who filled a room with her singing voice, and who wasn't afraid to begin an entirely new life when her children were grown.
For so many years, Mom didn't have the time or the place for the roses she loved.
Eventually, she did.
And I like to think she enjoyed every single one of them.