Beauty for the Taking . . .

     People think they can just have something beautiful or, if it is beautiful and easily attainable, they can just take it for themselves without thinking about why it is so beautiful in the first place. The rose bush maybe was once part of someone's garden or landscaping plan but it is no longer. It has not been pruned in years and grows randomly along a sidewalk. Actually, it doesn't grow right along a sidewalk. It grows right next to an old stone fence in a backyard. It grows right out of where the bottom of the stones meet the ground. Many of the houses in this neighborhood were built at the beginning of the twentieth century. The eroded, yet still viable stone fence is behind one of the houses so the fence is old itself. At one point in the history of the home ownership, someone built a privacy fence inside the stone fence. On the back side of it, there is a stone fence. It only blooms in late August or September as it starts to get direct sunlight later in the day because the sun is lower in the sky. Otherwise, the rest of the summer even when it is hot and sunny, trees keep the rose bush in the shade. Roses like heat and they especially like sunshine.

     Last week, when I was walking Yoshi at night when it was dark, I walked by the scraggly rosebush and the single rose was still there; Dark and lush in the night. It was black in color in the darkness even though it is a gorgeous red in the sunlight.

      Today, when I was walking Yoshi, I noticed that the single rose was missing and felt angry at whomever took this one. Even worse than that, someone had removed it and I saw it in a blue recycling bin. Tossed in there like it's beauty never mattered. Several weeks ago, there were two gorgeous roses on the errant bush. The smell of these deep red with a hint of pink roses is beyond description. I would find an excuse to walk by them just to smell them and I wondered if I was the only one who knew or cared of their existence. People want beautiful things. Why is that? Is that why someone severed the blooms from the scraggly bush and took them like they didn't even matter? I saw the evidence of the theft. Along the sidewalk, I saw a trail of six or seven rose petals and bruises where some of them had already been stepped on. People are fools. They want the beauty for themselves so they must have ripped both blooms off. Maybe, if was the same person. Maybe, it was 2 different people.
   
     When I saw the single bloom gone, I just figured someone had, again, ripped the gorgeous bloom off the scraggly bush. They had. But, it was worse. I don't know how I noticed this but I did. I saw it tossed in a recycling bin right up the sidewalk from the bush. It looked dead and sad and flattened.