They want answers and they want them now.
What are her policies where does she stand what does she believe in and what glorious goals motivate her? They want commitment to a cause a sacrifice for an ideal.
And the truth is all she really believes in is getting through the day somehow. Being kind trying to be honest —but they want more they have perfected expectations.
There are gardens well planted and planned where roses grow with thorns and gardeners with thick gloves prune.
Then there are the wildflowers whose seeds are blown by winds or dropped by passing birds to grow in far-off fields and between cracks in sidewalks.
There were always bright deep-red roses in the middle of their dining room table sending the scent of elegance and planning throughout the room of rich history and guaranteed future.
This week there were no roses at the flower shop by the time she got there only a bouquet of some red wildflowers that resembled roses but they still had those over-fat stems and free-flowing petals.
She was a bit disappointed at first that the roses were gone because that was what was expected but when she picked up the bunch of half-weeds half-flowers she loved them.
She brought them home and put them in the vase — this time not cutting the stems to make sure they all perfectly align as she does with the roses — and they fell in the vase with the carefree innocence of open fields of tracks she used to walk in the woods when times were safe and life was open. When nothing more than how the dew lay on a log or a cricket passing was important.
And those flowers on the table pulled her heart to somewhere she hadn’t been in a long long time. The open field the natural breeze after hot still air. And how even on the most perfect days the thought of coming home to firm walls and safety still pulls though she craves so much to be out.
And they insist on asking her what she believes what are her truths. And she thinks They are like roses beautiful and majestic planned and planted and watered at regular intervals but she is not like them and they cannot understand. Maybe she is more like the wildflower who drinks what water comes and draws from the dew of the earth when rain doesn’t fall.
Wildflowers don’t need explanation or permission why they are there and how they got there. It’s known. G-d planted them. Can she explain G-d?
Wildflowers grow outside in fields in meadows in quiet unvisited places. She has quiet places in her soul she doesn’t want visited.
Roses grow in gardens attached to houses attached to families attached to histories. Her husband’s grandmother had 100 rosebushes in her garden before the Nazis cut them down.
There’s something lonely and lowly yet regal about the wildflower there on the hills and mountaintops blowing in breezes something that reminds her of the Imahos. And how every time she tries to plan and plant it doesn’t ever work out but when she lets G-d do it it does.
And she keeps saying how she loves those flowers how much joy they bring her and everyone thinks she lost it a little getting so excited about flowers. She loves them because they look like roses but they are not they follow the sun resist the wind. They seem to sing a song of independence from what she doesn’t know.
She thought about the Parah Adumah the Red Heifer which could only purify if it never had a yoke on its neck if it was never “planned and planted” like a cultivated rose.
Yet to be on her Shabbos table the flowers had to be picked and cut wrapped in cellophane and sold put in a vase all by a human.
And that’s why she loved those flowers so much because they were a little of both and that’s why she couldn’t exactly explain is she wildflower or rose and where she stands.