A Day Like No Other

And tomorrow, if it comes, will be the same

Come, let us go, while we are in our prime,   
And take the harmless folly of the time!   
    We shall grow old apace, and die   
    Before we know our liberty.
    Our life is short, and our days run   
    As fast away as does the sun.   
And, as a vapour or a drop of rain,   
Once lost, can ne'er be found again,   
    So when or you or I are made
    A fable, song, or fleeting shade,   
    All love, all liking, all delight   
    Lies drown'd with us in endless night.   
Then, while time serves, and we are but decaying,   
Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying.
--Robert Herrick

A Ketchup-and-Mustard Rose in the author’s garden

The final stanza of a poem, the spring passing into summer, and the warming of our blood with the rising of the sun. I was thinking of the first line of another of Herrick’s poems this morning, ‘gather ye rosebuds while you may’ and realized it’s not what I wanted. Herrick’s admonition to girls to marry while they could no longer applies to me - if it ever really did. The life and times of people in the seventeenth century was very different than it is in the modern era where we have clean water, clean food, central air conditioning, and a much longer life expectancy for those and other reason.

A rose, bloomed and denuded of her petals, is still a rose.

The rosebud, tight with promise, unfurls into full beauty. Then, visited by the bee, the petals fall and the hip swells into rich sweetness. If I follow the metaphor to it’s end, I am in the winter of life, having send my seedlings off into the world to grow and bloom on their own accord. I am what remains. My garden, fragrant and flourishing, is not yet falling into Herrick’s drowning night. I have still ahead of me a time to drowse and dream, to write and scheme. I can make art, with muddy hands, in planting more roses. Roses, and other things.

Today is a day like no other day has ever been, and if we live to see tomorrow, so will it be the same. When the sun rises from it’s sleep, I shall go out into the garden in the dew, and take a velvet petal from a fading rose, to see if the scent lingers on, and bring it back to my desk. Flowers are fleet, some last less than a day, but I have years yet to come. Years where there will be tears and triumphs, and in winters I will wonder whether my roses will return.

I shall go a-Maying into this year, and revel in the blooms of it while I have them. Regrets for the past may haunt my sleep, but in waking I shall stretch out these aging bones towards the sun and spend my days in the gardens where the blooming things are, and the sweetness of berries to stain my lips.

Now that I am of an age, I can do as I please! I am no longer concerned with the petals of my raiment or beauty. I can wrinkle and whiten and be what I am, without concern. I am content with my books and cats around me, and my husband’s snoring telling me my life’s companion is near. I shall go a-Maying! I may not leap and run with the rising of Spring in my blood, but there are no demands and expectations on my time and body any longer. I can grow old, content, and find that the withered fruiting years are the sweetest of them all.