One thing I have learned in my life is that after every hard time, every struggle, there comes a new dawn.  The trick is to be open to it.  To say Yes to its gifts.

Change can be hard.

I know that my mother was anxious in the days leading up to my father’s retirement. I was there when, in a rare gesture of neediness, she leaned against my father and told him of another sleepless night of worry.

A major anxiety for my mother was that she was retiring, along with my Dad.  Mom had enjoyed the unofficial but all-consuming and highly rewarding job of being a minister’s wife for all the years they had been married.

What would she do with herself? How would she find fulfillment? Wouldn’t she be bored and lonely, alone in the new house out in the country?

It was during this time that Mom and I went to see Jim B, a man in our church, who had asked us to stop by.

This retired factory worker and self-taught master gardener had trained a climbing rose up the side of his garage and across the upper story.  “It’s a good-looking rose,” he said. “I want to give you a piece of it.”

Mom and Dad stuck that piece of “Jim B’s rose” in the back seat of their car and planted it in the front yard of their retirement home, on Island Lake in Northern Michigan.

Later, when my husband and I built our own home, my mother said, “I have a rose for you.” Honestly, I wasn’t too thrilled about Mom’s insistence that I take “Jim B’s rose”.  I wanted a spectacular rose, and in the sandy soil at Mom’s house this rose had only gotten a foot tall and bloomed once a year.  But I brought “Jim B’s Rose” home and planted it by my deck.

“Jim B’s Rose” turned out to be that classic champion of American roses, New Dawn. 

In my rich prairie soil that rose grew canes 30 feet long, which I trained in and out of the deck’s railing.  Its clouds of pale pink blooms mingled with the purple flowers of the Jackmanii clematis I planted beside it. That wall of color and recurrent bloom, year after year, punctuated the active years when preteens and then teenagers raced across that deck.

I still have “Grandma’s New Dawn,” as my children call it, growing in my yard.

I plan to pass it on to whoever in my family would like a piece. My hope is that “Grandma’s New Dawn” will live on in one family garden or another, after I am gone.

But even more than this living rosebush I cherish the stories of what Jim B and my mother did with their lives, after that morning meeting in Jim B’s yard.  I love what their lives teach me about resilience, about being open to the future, about making the most out of wherever life places you.

After his wife died, Jim B sold his house and moved to Florida. In his 80s now, he took on a new task: memorizing the botanical names of the plants he had grown for years.  He fell in love, got married again, and kept right on gardening.

My mother found, in her retirement, a zest-filled, enjoyment-filled life. For 23 years, she and my Dad ran a “vacation destination” home, creating years of priceless memories for their children and grandchildren of swimming, rowing, fishing, campfires and s’mores. After my father died, Mom stayed on in that house, loving and hosting family for years to come.

Death.  Loss.  Change. As inevitable as summer storms and winter blizzards.

But after those endings, a new dawn always comes.

If we are open to it.

I hope that there will always be a New Dawn rose in my garden.

But more than that, I want to emulate the new dawns my mother and Jim B created, after life’s storms, after the death of loved ones, after great change.

In my life, as in my garden, I want to cherish each new dawn.