Peace is something that we humans have to work at, if we want it.  We have to cultivate it, in our families, our relationships, and our communities. My grandmother did all those things. She even grew peace in her garden.

It was a hot summer afternoon at my grandparents’ farm in Northern Michigan, in the late 1960s. My grandmother was showing me her flower garden, a well-tended circle of bulbs and plants just outside the farmhouse kitchen door. When she pointed to one particular rosebush, her face changed. “That’s ‘Peace’,” she said huskily, her voice a mixture of wonder, reverence, and longing. “It came out at the end of The War.” Her body became still as she spoke about the Peace rose and how it embodied the world’s desire that peace would remain forever, now that WWII was over. To my grandmother, this was far more than a rosebush. This was hope in living form.  This was both longing and resolution, the embodiment of a fervent desire that the world would never again go through such an ordeal.

(My grandmother was not alone in loving and cherishing this rose. Created by a famous rose breeder in France and smuggled into the US in a diplomatic satchel, Peace was launched in the US on April 29, 1945, just as Berlin fell and near the end of WWII. Peace became the best-selling rose of its day and is still the best-selling rose of all time.)

That day when my grandmother spoke to me about her Peace rose, The War meant very little to me. It was something long dead, just pictures and words in a history book.  But to my grandmother, who sent her fiance off to WWI and her two sons to WWII, The War was still very much alive, a part of her own experience. To my grandmother, lovingly cultivating her Peace rose was an act of hope and, perhaps, a renewal of her determination to do her part to make sure that the world would never again go through what her family had experienced.

In her life, my grandmother worked hard to promote peace and improve the lives of those around her. She raised four resilient and remarkable children.  She fed hot suppers to motherless neighbor girls and washed their dresses overnight so they could go to school the next day in clean clothes. She formed a Fellowship Circle of neighbor women, who taught themselves skills to improve their lives. She bucked public opinion and pushed (successfully) for a consolidated school district, to improve education for all the area’s children. She taught Sunday School and sang in the choir.  She spoke to a neighbor about his mistreatment of his children and told him it had to stop. (It did.) On Sunday afternoons after they retired, she and my grandfather would go for a drive and if they saw a stranger, they would stop and introduce themselves.  At my grandmother’s funeral I heard a story about how she was the first person someone had met when they moved to East Jordan, and how she made them feel so welcome.

We humans are, sadly, prone to war. Decades after my grandmother’s burial in a sleepy little small-town cemetery, war is once again raging in Europe. Here in the States, there is no physical war, but there is war of another kind, a spreading of hatred and isolation and a war of words and ideas, a substituting of easy lies for hard truths. 

My grandmother’s Peace rosebush is long gone, but the Peace rose itself is still widely available. This winter I placed an order for a Peace rosebush. It will arrive any day now.  I’ll be planting it in my garden soon.

I hope that it will be a reminder to me, as it was for my grandmother, of the awesome and wondrous thing that peace is. And also a reminder that peace is something we have to work at to keep alive. Not just in our gardens, but in our families and our communities. And in our hearts.