Roses in Winter

   Just recently at my house, we began fighting off the annual assault of ladybugs. It wasn’t a pretty sight, at least on the creek where I live. A UPS driver had to turn on his wipers in broad daylight to sweep away the hordes that dive-bombed his truck on his way to my house. Although most areas of the country have some ladybug problems, it has been something akin to a Martian invasion for the past few years on my little corner of Appalachia. Making it worse was the fact that most of the weather stripping around the doors had been removed for painting the house (something the contractors assured us would be done by Labor Day). At least the worst now seems to be over, but I’m still walking around the house every evening with a portable vacuum cleaner strapped to my shoulder like Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting off miniature cyborgs.
   I’m not sure why we are plagued with these creatures every year; different theories abound. The Extension Services claim that the wet summer produced a bumper crop of aphids that in turn produced an algebraic expansion of the ladybug population in the hills. One rumor attributes the onslaught to over-zealous government agencies to supply turkey food, but I can’t find any reference to turkeys eyeing these little beasts as dinner. And if I do find such a reference, I’m sure I will lose my appetite for turkey. Whatever the case, this yearly battle diminishes my appreciation of the season, which, at least in the places where the mountains have not been blown up for their coal, is glorious. I actually enjoy raking leaves and burning them, as long as I have the backdrop of brilliant colors all around me, and I don’t mind the usual chores of pruning and cleaning up flowerbeds, but I really hate having my work follow me into the house.
   I truly believe that ladybugs are a beneficial insect, but too much of even a good thing is too much.
   This year we did extensive remodeling to the outside of our house and spent far too much money on the grounds, at least for the satisfaction we still have not gotten from doing the work. I never really appreciated Tom Hanks’ frustration in The Money Pit until I heard the same response from the contractors whenever I asked them how much longer the work would take: two weeks! I heard it the first time two weeks before Memorial Day and too many times since then. So now, instead of sitting outside on the terrace sipping a cool iced tea under the new arbors back during the sweltering days of August, I find myself fighting ladybugs as those arbors receive their final coat of paint, burrowing in for winter and dreaming of spring.
   This year we put out a beautiful miniature rose bush in a large pot, just until the renovations were complete so that we could plant it permanently in the place we selected for it. So far, it has done exactly what the nursery said it would and has bloomed constantly. It has also grown to about four times its original size, and we are hoping that it will continue to flourish in the permanent spot we selected. I suppose I have a weakness for roses; the aroma of no other flower sets off as many memories for me as they do. It is probably a legacy of the pale pink roses my great-great-grandmother Dorcus Hopkins once planted all over Greasy Creek more than a hundred years ago.
   I was never told where she acquired them, so I can only speculate, but she had them growing around her house in the middle of what would later become the Greasy Creek coal camp, and she planted them on the cemeteries she zealously protected throughout her life. When her son, my great-grandfather Harrison Hopkins bought the property where my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father lived out their lives, she planted both the roses and a cedar tree for remembrance in his yard. The cedar tree, broken and ragged, is still standing and I should have cut it down years ago, but I simply don’t have the heart to do so. I am waiting for the wind to push it over so I can blame its demise on something else. It survived the great fire that destroyed Harrison’s house in the 1930’s and numerous assaults by wind and snow since then, and even if it had not been planted by one of the icons of the Hopkins family, it deserves my respect simply for surviving.
   The roses, however, are another matter. Dorcus planted them on nearly all the cemeteries up and down Greasy Creek, but I can no longer find them on any of them, and the main cemetery to have them is itself now gone. There were other locations for her roses, but they are gone too. After she died in 1912, her widower sold her house to the coal company that was buying up Greasy Creek and family members took the roses away to their own houses. After the coal camp disappeared, my grandmother Rissie bought the old property back in 1940 and brought the roses back with her to decorate the camp house that stood on the same spot. That house itself was torn down about twenty years ago, and the new one erected there has no trace of the flowers. In fact, the last place I could see them was from my parents’ living room window as they yearly wound their way around a tree at the edge of their lawn. Along with the cedar tree and my great-grandfather’s dinner bell, they were the last links I had to the past of my family.
   Readers of Spirits in the Field have occasionally asked me for a sprig of Dorcus’ Roses, the flowers I titled a chapter for in the book, but I have been unable to help. Every year the last of her roses, pale pink, nearly white, enlivened the yard where generations of Hopkinses grew up, but after Spirits was published in 2003, the roses never returned. The sprigs I had attempted to save also failed, and except for the dried and crumbling trunk of the great vine at the edge of my father’s yard, there is nothing there now. It surprised me at the time and I began to think that they came back every year as Dorcus’ reminder to me to write down the stories that were nearly lost, and after the book was published, there was no longer any reason for the ancient vine to struggle to life every spring.
   Again, I do not know where the first vine came from, but I suspect the roses made their way across Pine Mountain in an oxcart from Virginia, when the Hopkins family came here in 1822, and I suspect all the Hopkins branches took their cuttings with them when they started their own homesteads in the decades that followed. My great-great-grandmother may have wanted to supply something tangible to her family to reinforce the stories she passed on to us, and knew that the roses would be living reminders, but I can find no trace of them anymore. Some of the older family members remember them, but there is no longer anywhere to see them and drink in their aroma.
   Recently, however, I was told something intriguing.
   Although a coal company now owns Ripley Knob, where much of the story of Bright Wings to Fly takes place, some of my family now owns the land nearby, and they told me that they recently stumbled onto what might have been the foundation of Dorcus’ father’s cabin. Readers of Wings know that the cabin was closed in 1904 after Elisha Hopkins’s death, and although it was reopened briefly as a meetinghouse after Dorcus died, it soon fell into neglect and burned to the ground during one of the forest fire seasons sometime in the 1920’s. The railroad and the newer roads into Greasy Creek caused the old buffalo path from Hopkins Creek to Greasy Creek to be abandoned and, except for the annual pilgrimage on Decoration Day to Elisha’s cemetery, no one visited Ripley Knob for nearly a century. Eventually, the mountain reclaimed the place where Elisha and Joseph, his doomed Confederate brother, built their cabin as mere boys and where the Old Ones, as Dorcus called them, themselves grew up.
   I was told that, in addition to discovering the possible foundation of the cabin, they also found some strangely beautiful flowers growing nearby, but for some reason were unable to adequately describe them. What color were they, I asked? Pink, they said, almost white. It was difficult to swallow when I heard them tell me this.
   Could there be one last place on Greasy Creek where Dorcus’ Roses still bloom or could they have come back in that spot after all these years? I haven’t had the chance to go back up there since last spring and now, with winter approaching, it will be a while before I return. But you can be assured that there will be an expedition in spring. One can always dream; at least we are granted that much, and for me there are few dreams more pleasant, with the specter of months of snow and ice approaching, of pale pink roses, nearly white, amid the cold and gloom of winter.