The house in the roses

Yes, as some of you might have thought, our Mima and Papa had journeyed up north to spend a few days with us girls.  We celebrated birthdays, laughed, danced, sung, jumped on the trampoline until our sides hurt and pretended we were real fairies and princesses.  We made some lovely birthday banners and decorations for our birthday party on Saturday and make some yummy cakes.  Elsa, from Frozen 'land' visited.  She taught us how to behave as true princesses and be proper at all times.  On Sunday we visited a petting zoo.  We got to touch and feed a very tall camel that spit on us, we petted and fed tiny horses and lots of baby goats, and a nice lady, keeper of the animals, let us pet the only sloth there was.  He was as slow and funny looking as all the funny sloths on that movie we saw the previous day.  Then, in the afternoon, we went by the house in the roses...  well, just only our Mima, because she wanted to go all by herself, to gather up in the hem of her long skirts all the moments, and joys and disappointments her little heart could muster upon entering her once upon a time, lovely garden...  ask her, and she'll tell you what she saw, and heard and felt in her precious garden... 

While there, she thought about all of you her dear bloggy friends who have followed her to her little white cottage, down in the south from the time she dwelled in her gardens, at the house in the roses...  She told us that long, thorny weeds grew everywhere there.  Among the roses, around the once lovely Shasta daisies gardens and the salvia and lavender.  The ornamental grasses were so unkempt, they grew like long weeds and her dear rose bushes were in really bad shape, some of them had disappeared entirely.  How did that happen, she didn't know.  The grapevines grew rampant; suffocating every space and taking over the pretty archers.  Weeds and little trees were growing where they were not supposed to, suffocating the climbing roses growing in the pergola in the round garden.  It broke her heart to see all the peonies bushes she planted in the rotunda being suffocated by weeds and such, but she was also happy to see how much they have grown and how round and healthy they were. 

If you ask me, I don't understand my Mima.  Even under such circumstances and negligence and carelessness, she still finds those gardens of hers a lovely place to be and a verdant and precious island of peace and enchantment like a gem hiding under rubbish... you go tell her she doesn't need to worry.  She will always have flowers to grow and roses to perfume her soul... 'cause that's how I feel, and that's how it is...