In celebration of Earth Day, I’m writing about my friends the aphids. They are attacking my New Dawn rose bushes. These two rhapsodic rose bushes are climbers, growing higher every year. If you count their spilling over the trellis and arbor, which I keep adding on to, they are about 16 feet tall at this point, with more life in them than all the new trees and bushes I have planted in the last four years. The buds, only visible the last few days, are growing. It will be a few more days before they open.

 

I was so excited at dusk last night to see if they’d started blooming that Mocha cat and I went out onto the screen porch after dinner, and I noticed – horrors of all horrors – that the aphids had returned. I’ve been looking for them, while trying to think positive thoughts that maybe they’d stay away this year. I really thought I’d headed them off with a few preventive whiffs of rose bug poison. But no, there were a few tell-tale headless stalks visible but undeterred, thankfully, from reaching for the sun.

 

If I’d been successful in ordering liquid garlic to spray instead of pesticides, I’d probably be OK. But the company turned out to be fraudulent. And I’m just not willing to load the air with pesticides, so it may take a few more years to conquer this battle. But, in the meantime, I’ve decided to be at peace.

 

“Live and let live!” my husband used to say about vermin. The kids and I didn’t pay much attention to this bravado until he said it one evening about the roach crawling across our map of the world in the family room. Then we cringed at the grossness. I said it seemed a little irresponsible to be that passive, even though I hate killing any creature. “World traveler,” the kids named the poor little guy, groaning and giggling at the same time it made it across several continents, safely.

 

That memory is now long gone, as I breathe in and let the pale pink roses warm my heart. I asked the protecting guardian of wildife and nature, Ariel, to spare me a few blooms. 

 

And so in a spirit of compromise on Earth Day, I am conceding to the little bugs. We share a gentle love and discriminating taste. I should be able to give up a few decapitated stalks in the midst of boundless beauty. As for the carpenter bees that have been digging holes in the arbor, I’ll tolerate them, too, until I find a green solution.

 

As life so often brings us full circle, I am reminded of ninth grade when we had to memorize a poem. I chose Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall” which I still remember after all these years:

 

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower–but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is. 
 

Now that I’m wiser, I don’t yearn to know so passionately why things are the way they are in the universe. I’ve fought too many battles, demanded too much control, and sought too many answers. I just want to enjoy my roses.

 

With triumph over the aphids no longer my priority, I can settle in quite nicely to co-existing with both aphids and bees. It makes me wonder how they adapt to making do with humans. Maybe setting an example of mutual respect is no effort to them at all. Maybe they, too, think that it only takes a handful of pink patches at dawn and dusk to fill their heart’s desire, and their stomachs.

 

Looks like my husband had it right all along by picking the important battles. A few missing rose buds are the right savory touch to enticing me to contemplate changing my position on how much I fight with nature. Or how much I resist anything unwelcome.