I used to bake Tru-Orange flavored puff pastries when I was younger, which mother affectionately called 'chiffon cakes', although they're not thin cloth materials made of silk and weren't that soft either, literally. There must be something wrong with the ovens today since I can't figure out as to why all my kneading and pleading doesn't work out its magic anymore. My wife said I must have forgotten the recipes or probably the yeast I was using were already past expiration date. She must have noticed that every single cake I baked flopped or turned into something ressembling a millstone. My daughter said its all because I was scrimping on everything, baking time included. Gas is expensive too, right?
It was also during that time when a few varities of roses were blooming right through Mother's front yard garden, the years she anxiously thought I turned yellow, although much of that passion was born out of reading Mills and Boon's paperback novels that my older sisters were hoarding in the dining room bookshelves. Tradition must have equated that flowers and cakes go well together to sum up some silly notion that I was going soft, as vacuous people are inclined to perceive, though I didn't blame them for being so. Boys just don't plant roses, right?
Wrong.
I do and the poor St.Valentine has nothing to do with it considering I've never had any serious relationship whatsoever with the opposite sex during that wimpy life phase I wasn't very fond of remembering, regretfully. My day as a youngster always starts with a bowlful of steaming rice porridge and ends well under the kitchen stairwell thinly slicing those sticky banana stalks and pounding them afterwards with a wooden pestle before mixing them with milled rice husk to feed mother's voracious hogs. Serious relationships were far and remote as the chilly Siberian tundra except perhaps for some coercive happenstances of mutual understanding borne out of youthful taunts, unrestrained ignorance and envy. I can't even remember saying 'I love you' to someone else, not even to myself. There were instead a few potshot crushes and short shrift affections especially with the loveliest girl in high school who remains as lovely as she is today than as she was before. Turns out I was stupid enough to believe that we were of distant relation which eventually wasn't true either. Anyway, we both grew up in a quaint little town where everybody is related to anybody at some point in time somehow, either by intermarriage or just by the simple fact of being long time neighbors. Honestly though, I believed she never knew about my intentions until now and hopefully, to make things less embarassing for me, will keep it that way. She was definitely the reason for the white roses. People usually wear white during Chinese funerals, right?
The potted double-petalled purplish pink hugging inside the unpainted picket fence just below the guava tree in front of our old house were strickly for show-off only, partly because they were grafted hybrids from a cutting that I yanked from somebody else's garden. My on and off girlfriend at that time was totally unaware that what I had been giving her were actually from the elementary school garden and the reason for it was because there were also a few bees in her bedeviled heart, as what my best friend reminds me of, constantly. We're not friends on Facebook anyway so there's no need to worry.
Unquestionably, the prolific bloomers were the deep reds which goes bald as they were in huge demand for the corsage during the school's yearend commemoration exercises. They were the only roses planted right in the soil because they were of native variety and were highly resistant to aphids and other pest. I also happen to hate their prickly thorns. 'Never sell your flowers if you don't want to be castigated by the whole neighbor-friendly community', mother used to say. I'm not a whore but that would have been a lot of pennies for a hard-up youngster like me and it was agonizingly tempting.
You don't need to be a romantic to be able to plant roses anyway, or a horticulturist for that matter, as I reckoned years later. A 'handsome' sapling or a 'decent' grafting in a nutrient 'rich', moisture retentive soil is all that is needed other than a pest and temperature controlled environment to grow most varieties of roses. (Mother said to remember those three words too!)
So, why roses?
It was all probably because at that age, I thought roses are like girls that needed constant attention and an all-out patience in order to grow and bloom into something beautiful and sweet-smelling. They must also be handled delicately otherwise the petals will wither easily or you will get feverish from a single prick of its pernicious thorn. Too much water and the stems will molder and rot. Starve the soil and you'll get miniaturized flowers that will only flourish for a day. It would take a lot of time to understand their nature and disposition inasmuch as their inversely inscrutable intentions. They are mostly beautiful externally but dare to venture a tad closer and you will definitely be scorched crisply by their temper or worst being prickled by their biting retorts. Mother said to be very careful with them, one freakish parental lesson I never took to heart very seriously then. I should have known better!
Roses too are like second chance promises that men foolishly fall into believing. Girls like everything expensive, that's the hard truth, though it is only through the gift of a flower where their hearts melt and eventually reveals the fidelity of their true feelings. Roses are like truth serum that most girls can't resist or lie about though luckily for them men gullibly believed otherwise.
The exquisite canary yellows are definitively exotic, larger than most varieties and very delicate to grow. The buds seldom flourish into full-blown flowers but when they do the waiting was worth it. Compared to the other varieties, they wither easily and will never last long enough in the vase even when an Aspirin tablet is added to the water, one reason why they're best suited for cemetery votives.
Compost takes a long time to rot while fertilizers are expensive and hard to procure during those days. So then, the egg shells that were proudly impaled and lined up along the decorative finials of the kitchen sink were expropriated instead, as a substitute, along with a few sun dried starfishes that were pounded into powdery dust by mother's garlic pestle and the redolent cow dungs that bemired the town's public plaza. Some say urine is good when mixed with water but I was afraid the flowers would turn musky so I settled for beer. Turns out I liked beer better than flowers, and skittish girls too, so the plan was stupefyingly dismissed heartily.
The bold pink roses were definitively the most memorable of the lot partly because of the circumstance of its incipience rather than its distinctive rareness. It took me a few months to win the heart of a girl just to be able to transgress her uncle's garden for the pretentious variety and it was worth it! Her uncle, ( for heaven's sake, forgive me!) was a priest by the way.
Valentines date?
Nah, that's totally rubbish. Winning the heart of a girl with a wrapped Cartier, a glittering Bulgari or a sleek Prada is exponentially much better albiet to the special someone that you really, really loved, a bouquet of flowers is honestly more than enough. I recommend the 'all-weather' polyethelene ones made in China because they really suggest something like 'forever'. Otherwise, get busy and bake a damn cake!
