People think that only the elderly, living single, forgotten lives, can feel lonely and despondent.  People do not realize that the young, invisible in a crowd, can feel just as lonely, and just as miserable.

When I was in sixth grade, I felt terminally different. I felt like a total misfit, a permanent ugly duckling in a sea of pretty cheerleaders and popular other girls.  I was taller than any boy in my class, smarter than most, overweight and (the final kiss of death) I wore glasses.  What boy could possibly ever be interested in me?

I was certain that I would never find someone, that I would end up living alone in crippling loneliness for the rest of my life.

That was the year I suddenly, unexpectedly sprouted a passion for flower gardening.

I got books from the library, devoured seed catalogs. I designed grandiose gardens, mapping them out on paper.

The problem was, I had no money. And no plants.

That was when my mother (God bless her) took me to see Mrs. T. 

Mrs. T. was a small, elderly widow in our church. She wore a hair net and if she ever spoke two words in public, I never heard them.

Like me (I thought), Mrs. T. was an oddity and a misfit… doomed (I thought) to live in perpetual, aching loneliness for the rest of her life.

But when I went to see Mrs. T., her life wasn’t the barren existence I had pictured. For Mrs. T. was a master gardener. Her large lot was almost entirely garden: hundreds of plants, a profusion of color and bloom.

We filled Mom’s car with plant after plant; all gifts from Mrs. T. At the last moment, Mrs. T. took me to her compost heap and picked up a green two-stalked V of a plant with a tiny root. “I dug this out and threw it here yesterday,” Mrs. T. told me. “You can’t kill this rose.”

A real live rosebush. 

My very own. 

I took it reverently.

That day Mrs. T. also showed us the giant craft table in her basement. In the winter, when she couldn’t garden, Mrs. T. made Christmas ornaments.  I still have one that she gave to my mother… a fragile, sparkling thing of beauty.

Mrs. T. never knew it, but along with that rosebush, all those years ago, she gave me a very powerful gift: the gift of hope.

Maybe I never would find someone, never marry, never be popular like those pretty cheerleaders in school. But I could become something.  I could grow beautiful roses, make beautiful gardens. I could use my hands to create something lovely and permanent and worthwhile.

Because of Mrs. T., I now knew that, if my future dealt me loneliness, I could deal with it as Mrs. T. dealt with hers: spending my days creating beauty all around me.

***

As Mrs. T. had predicted, that scrap of a rosebush not only lived, but thrived.

“Mrs. T’s rose” turned out to be the famous old Seven Sisters rose, whose blossoms show seven shades of color, from bright pink down to creamy white, as they age in the sun.

I have grown the Seven Sisters in every garden I’ve ever had. When I married and had children (yes, my gloomy teenage projections about my future turned out to be completely untrue) we took family pictures, every summer, in front of that glorious mass of color.