Buns and Roses

I am so easily distracted in the Spring. I have this week off from teaching, all the students are on service/learning trips.  I had started off the morning thinking I'd better do a little house cleaning, then on the way to the laundry, which is out back in the garage, I was confronted, again, by the visage of the pink rose bush. It has been there for decades, when I moved in about four years ago I started pruning it. It decidedly liked pruning and showed it by putting out more and more flowers. Last year it came up with some sort of blight which I obsessively removed and this year is looking pretty good, except that all the wind we have had has  blown out the blooms and there are already hips to be clipped. As it seemed really a better sort of day to be outside rather than in, I,  like the Mole in Wind in the Willows, cursed cleaning and came to the aid of the rose bush. Naturally, my thoughts drifted to all things roses; the part in Alice in Wonderland where the roses are being painted; rose jam; rose water; the rose petal strewn by flower girls at my nieces's wedding this last weekend; rose hips, should I be harvesting these hips?;  Tyler and Sydney (the rabbits) love to eat roses, but when offered a rose from another source are not interested, not at all; rose buds are an herb in the Chinese Materia Medica, Mei Gui Hua, and are used for female issues like irregular menstration and PMS, or just grumpiness and flank pain for any gender. I remembered the herbs teacher from school, Dr. Liao, saying he wanted a truckload of this herb for his wife. This may have been just a teaching story, or his wife may have been irritable. We all just laughed because we loved him and now remember about Mei Gua Hua forever. Being visually skewed, I wondered what would happen if I scanned some of the roses I was clipping off (my son had the camera in China). So I stopped work to try that idea out, I didn't want the background to be just white from the inside of the scanner, so I covered the roses with some character practice paper that the rabbits had gotten at and chewed up a bit. Boyfriend conjectured they were trying to learn Chinese using the ingestion method. I did finish the pruning, actually finished something, and even got the trimmings into the green recycling can. Continued to have ideas that amused me and so fed some the roses to the rabbits, since they had eaten some of the background paper of my digital composition, they might as well have the roses, besides they do love them. This event I recorded using the iPhotobooth feature, you will remember the camera is not in this country. The rabbits are Tyler and Sydney, they are brother and sister English Spots. I adopted them from Rabbit Haven, a rabbit rescue organization.  This first picture is Tyler wondering if he can consume the pile of petals before Sydney, top right, realizes what is going on.  The next picture is Sydney, getting her due, no rabbit left behind. If you want to treat your rabbit to rose petals be sure they come from an unsprayed rose. Some lagomorphs enjoy the leaves as well, be sure these are tender and presented without the thorns. Eating a lot of roses in the smaller rabbits can color the urine, be aware of that, it is only temporary, like when we eat a quantity of beets. A rose is a rose is a rose. A rose by any other name. Sometimes a rose is just a rose, or is that a cigar?