This beautiful little flower is a friend of mine. I was walking through a Swap Meet at the end of the day as the final remnants of vendors were packing their wares into their beat-up trucks. Scattered about the parking lot were flecks of color of discarded, unwanted items and trash.
This flower was on the parking lot pavement, strewn among browning petals and receipts and ketchup stained napkins where a flower booth sat hours before. Nobody had chosen it that day, and when the vendor gave away the unsold flower bunches at the end of the day to all the women in the booths around him, this rose was unworthy and tossed to the ground to be swept up and discarded. It called me from across the parking lot and it was love at first sight. I could see in it, there amid the scatters and tatters of discarded items, that it had a special fight inside, a spunk, a spark, and it maintained a sense of dignity despite its situation as if it was above its circumstances and was still searching for a way out. It lacked a bit of outer beauty and seems like it was born wilted already, but it had an inner beauty that outshined the rest.
I picked the wounded flower up and took it home, gave it some fresh water and a colorful cup to live in and placed it on the kitchen counter. While the odds looked bleak, in the end the rose’s spunk found a way to rise above and succeed. While all the other flowers that had been chosen that day are long gone and not to be remembered, this special friend of mine found a way to live forever inside these pages.
The rose touched me because it represents the fighter that lives somewhere magical inside each of us, that believes in us, and urges us on, and tells us we can do it when the world doubts. Even when we doubt.