Solo in the rose garden

Ten hours of working with digital photographs while the rain came down. Saving some, deleting others, putting some on flash drives or external hard drives, all in virtual folders. When there was only the simplicity of negatives and prints, we'd have an album or two and maybe a file-drawer full of folders and envelopes, a shoebox of cracking, dogeared prints we kept vowing to put in date-order. Now we are image-generating machines.

At seven as dusk fell, the rain finally stopped, and I went to the rose garden. I passed another solitary woman wiping raindrops from her brow. After a long mild and wet spring, the garden explodes with sweetness, with blossom and fragrance, as if for all the eight years I have lived in Portland, the earth was saving up, saving up, holding back, restraining itself. Now it lets go.

More Nelly Sachs: 

But between earth and sky 
unchanged as ever the psalms pray
turn in their quivers of radiant dust--
and the divers with divine salutations
find no orphaned realm
in the rose-red woods of the deep--

From Glowing Enigmas, by Nelly Sachs, translated by Michael Hamburger. Portland: Tavern Books, 2013.

P.S. After reading some comments, I have added three extras to show a portion of the layout and profusion of Portland's rose garden. It sprawls lusciously over layer after layer of ground, and the fragrance is dizzying.