After the rain

Click to enlarge

My hometown recently endured one of the worst storms in its history. A period of heavy rains was followed by a full day of near hurricane winds,. A perfect recipe for devastation and destruction and nature delivered a telling blow. None of the locals, apparently, have ever experienced anything like this windstorm and its calamitous effect – clearly in evidence at the local golf course where more than 260 trees were blown over. (Not a good time to attempt to correct a hook or slice.) The city and its people were hard hit, but fortunately, to my knowledge, there was no loss of life.

Not surprisingly, the media had a field day (excuse the pun) and reports and pictures focused on the devastation caused by the storm. The city shut down around midday and driving down the main road was like being in a ghost town. Actually, it felt like a typical Sunday, except there was nobody at church that I could see.

And yet, to demonstrate that life goes on, a rose tree in my garden chose this day to exhibit a spectacular floral masterpiece. Hard to imagine, but the bloom survived the onslaught and was rendered even more beautiful by a spattering of raindrops. And there's even a tiny black ant in the picture to prove it continued to provide shelter throughout the ordeal.

Occasionally, I pick a rose from my garden, usually a single stem, that then finds a temporary home in a champagne flute. It lives for a short while on my wife’s desk. In this instance, I refrained from picking the rose, figuring it had earned its place of honour in the garden. Far more deserving than a vase in my house.

There will be many more roses to flower in my garden. But there’s unlikely to be another storm of this magnitude in my hometown any time soon. Yet I chose the rose, rather than the scenes of destruction, as my photographic subject.

Guess that’s why I’m not a journalist.