On the desk in my room, my grandmother's crystal bud vase is filled with tiny pink tea roses.  Two days ago they were tight buds.  This morning they are fully opened and their fragrance floats through the air, drawn by the open window next to me as I write of roses.  My great-grandfather loved roses.  As nurseryman he helped bring commercial rose growing to East Texas in the late 1920s.  Did he know how I would grow to love roses, that I would wear only the scent of roses, would find roses on these altars in India, Nepal, and California, make an altar of my own, offer roses?  That his son, my grandfather, ninety-severn last summer, would keep a rose garden in Hope, Arkansas, by his wooden bushel basket mill?  That he would grown one hundred fifty varieties of roses?

          A climber rose growing outside my window this past winter forced its way through a crack, pushed open the window, and began to grow inside the room, toward my altar.  Respectful of such boldness in a flower, I let it grow.  Wild audacity.  The strength of a rose, determined to bloom, beyond reason.

     --  China Galland, Longing for Darkness--Tara and the Black Madonna, A Ten-Year Journey