Inspiration | Interpretation - A Rose Covered Wall
When the work, words, home, style, or talents of someone else makes your breath catch, stirs a longing, or causes you to lean in with curiosity, this is simply part of them reflecting part of you. Their life and work is not a prescription or formula, but an invitation for you to live fully yours. Take that awakening, that curiosity, and see what it becomes in your unique life.
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The shed was nearly buried by overgrown grasses, fallen branches, a rusting horse trailer and a slapped-together, bent-wire dog run. It was hiding, really, back alongside the creek, beneath all that, beneath a canopy of cottonwood trees. The design of it was plain and simple: a sloped roof with exposed rafter tails, and double doors centered on the longest wall; something built by a ranch hand back in the seventies from two by fours, two by sixes, plywood, and corrugated tin. It’s foundation? Two railroad ties. Over the years, the bare wood exterior had been scoured by winds, grooved by rains, greyed by the sun. The galvanized roof, patched where it leaked.
This was how it came to us eight years ago. Or, more rightly, how it was when we came to it.
It’s taken time. We re-homed the horse trailer, cut back weeds, trimmed the trees, hauled away loads of debris. We placed a wide wooden step in front of the shed’s double doors, and gave it a sandstone slab for a landing. Along its side, we built a flagstone terrace on which we set a picnic table with strand lights above. A cedar board fence screens off the back-of-shed service area. Flower beds soften it all.
Now growing up the weathered wood walls of that old shed? Three rambling rose bushes, in pale pink. They’re still young, but already reaching up the walls, cracking open new blushy blooms. One day, they’ll engulf the entire thing. The anticipation in my belly is extraordinary.
INSPIRATION: Every photo of every rose covered wall I’ve seen since childhood has surely inspired, but most notably, it was the rose-covered grey cedar buildings at Steve & Brooke Giannetti’s Patina Farm that brought it all home.
INTERPRETATION: A weathered grey shed, a well-amended flower bed around it’s base, and a rose variety that likes to climb, doesn’t mind shade in summer, or zone 4 cold in winter (hello, New Dawn). I planted the first one a few summers ago. This year, I added two more. Roses will abound!
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Loves? Next time you see an inspiring human, let them wake up the best in you. No inferiority or lack. No inadequacy or comparison. Just inspired curiosity, discovery, passion. You.
