Rose, Not Mary

She looked to Hera for answers, but the goddess was busy tending to the marital bliss of others.

Rose, not Mary opens the cupboard door. She pushes past sympathetic spices – cinnamon, ginger, cardamom – past the memory of delicate powders held soft in her mother’s hand and reaches for a jar of rosemary. Rosemary all nettles, inflexible, thorny.

Outside, a Purple Finch his perching feet hold tight a rose bush bundled in winter coat; burlap beneath a warbling song. He, too, is on watch.

Rose bends forward to catch a better glimpse, her glasses adjusted just so. The bird is not purple at all, but dipped in raspberry. Rose turns away. The birdsong is almost too much to bear in its sweetness. This, mother Mary’s favourite sparrow with its reddish-brown cheeks and fluid call, hops to the ground and walks sideways a short distance. The clatter of dishes has stopped. Rose’s hands rest against the sink’s edge, where water drips from her fingertips into the soapy water below. Standing there, Rose looks out at the back garden and sees what her mother’s eyes would have witnessed every autumn. Rose imagines a daughter. She smiles at the imaginary child who waves back and motions for her mother to watch her twirl until she falls to the ground surrounded by giggles.

It is the bird that brings Rose back. Here. As he takes flight, she imagines that his notes, rich in regret, might shake the hinged wooden frames above Mary’s garden that now belongs to Rose. She imagines this ballad making its way to the room above her mother’s kitchen where Rose replaces Mary.