Stop and smell the shrub roses

At King George station, the shrub roses are flowering. They're a bit late, along with everything else, but they're in bloom. Roses have the loveliest fragrance, I think, though this week I brought a heavenly bunch of lily of the valley in from the garden.

There's something special about these single-petalled roses that resemble the wild roses of my prairie childhood. These are a little bigger than the wild ones, but their perfume is just as rich and the colour just as gorgeous.

Like their wild cousins, they're survivors. Over the years of commuting I have more than once worried for their lives when they were brutally and unevenly cut back nearly to the ground. But they keep coming back. Each year they bloom from spring to late fall.

Every time I pass, I pause to sniff one individual bloom. It's a little ritual to remind me to enjoy life. No matter how rushed our pace, I tell myself, I have time to literally stop and smell the roses.