The Perfect Rose

By Keren Dibbens-Wyatt —

“These blasted raindrops!” said the rose. “Why do they have to keep falling on me?” She grumbled and grunted her way through the day, shaking her petalled mane every time a heavenly drip or a dewdrop had the audacity to rest on her smooth perfect pinkness.

“My head is not a waiting room or a hotel!” she screeched, “There’s nothing to see here, move along! I want to be dry and light and not weighed down by all this water!”

That afternoon a famous photographer came to the rose garden, having heard of its beauty, and the perfect rose shimmied her shoulders and prepared herself for international renown and a place on the cover of Top Garden magazine. But the photographer walked all around the garden and selected what the rose considered to be a far more straggly and inferior rose bush to focus on.

“But these are our best blooms,” said the gardener, indicating the bush on which the first rose was by far the most splendid, and scratching her head, “Why’ve you set up over there?” The photographer replied,

“These are holding the raindrops just beautifully and they glimmer like jewels, especially if I catch the light with my angle and lens just so,” and he showed the gardener through his viewfinder.

“Wow,” she said, “That is amazing, like little rainbows sitting on the petals.”

“Exactly,” he replied. “Plus perfection can be overrated you know. The perfect photograph is usually of something imperfect. Flawlessness can be boring and unemotive, it doesn’t necessarily engage.” The gardener nodded, having loved sawfly and caterpillars just as much as she had blooms and butterflies.

“Like the lawn?” she ventured, “I prefer moss and buttercups to endless stripes.”

“Exactly,” he smiled, and continued with his work. And the rose, who had heard all of this, stopped shaking her head when the rain fell, and squinted her eyes just a little, trying to see the jewels and rainbows in the drops, happy from then on to wear a watery tiara, whether it got her on the cover of a magazine or not.