Roses and Bananas

One of our elderly neighbors had died, and the wife was being moved into a nursing home. My husband had made friends with the son-in-law, and when the house was being closed up, he went over to see if he could help. The son-in-law knew about my husband's interest in flowers, so he told him to move anything he wanted to our yard. My husband dug up a rose bush that was probably almost five feet tall, and the roots had grown through a brick. He brought the bush (with the brick still attached) across the street, and set it out in the upper corner of our yard.

The bush was blooming when he moved it, and the blooms were huge. He cut them for my mother and me, and we enjoyed them for several days. The bush seemed all right for a while, but then DH became afraid that it was going to die. He did everything he could think of for the bush, but nothing seemed to help. During this time, we were at a family gathering, and he told his youngest brother about the plight of the rose bush.

My husband and his youngest brother shared a great many personality traits (and were similar in physical appearance, too), and one of them is a strong sense of humor, coupled with the ability to, shall we say, spin a yarn (there's a more graphic description, but we want to keep this relatively PG). Youngest brother told DH that he thought that the rose bush was suffering from a lack of potassium, and DH should put very ripe (almost ruined, actually) bananas into the dirt around the bush. DH was skeptical (see reference to yarn spinning), but decided that he had nothing to lose. He begged bananas from my mother for a while, and buried them around the bush.

The bush soon took a turn for the better, and ended up blooming for the second time during the season. DH was never sure if it was the bananas or one of the other treatments he'd already tried, but I think he wanted to believe that it was the bananas, and maybe it was. He couldn't wait to call his brother and share the news...their telephone conversations were always full of laughter, and that's something I miss about DH...the sound of his booming baritone laugh.