this morning

In my bed this morning, drinking my first cup of coffee, this was what I looked out on:

This is the dog rose (it used to be simply the root stock of an alba pillar but it took over and I’m happy to let it run wild) where I once saw a weasel peering in at me, surprised. I haven’t seen weasels since the cat Winter came out of the woods to live with us. Winter, who left half a bat at the sunroom door this morning—just its face and wing. And this is rose from the weasel’s perspective:

How is it that a rose can smell cool? This one does. Sweet and cool, as though it remembers its wild state. We have another Rosa canina I found up the mountain on one of our walks, easily identifiable as neither R. nutkana or a R. gymnocarpa, and I planted it in a mossy private area where our old dog Tiger liked to sleep. (How did it get there? Up the mountain, I mean? One of the mysteries, like the provenance of the tiny oaks I’ve found growing along our lower driveway, not Garry oaks but white oaks of some kind I think, and maybe the result of stored acorns left by squirrels. Or? I’ve brought them home and have them in various places.)

I love this time of year for its promise. The honeysuckle by the kitchen door:

For the table on the deck in the cool air:

For the optimism of tomatoes strung up in their pots:

I am puzzling my way through some material for a long essay, maybe a book, and it’s good to have the world at my window, my doorways. To remember Kobayashi Issa, in Robert Hass’s translation:

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms

Our cherry blossoms are long gone but everything else is burgeoning. Time to go outside to bury my face in roses. They don’t last long, giving way to long elegant hips that brighten the fall, but wait, that’s months away. And there’s still honeysuckle to come, and tomatoes, and many dinners on that waiting table.