Stopping to Smell the Roses

   Margaret Dilloway's The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns was a summer escape to central California, full of lush backyard gardens, sea views, rose competitions, and a cantankerous biology teacher and rose breeder named Galilee (known as Gal, for short) Garner. She kept me chuckling, sympathizing, admiring, and sometimes fuming during the entire book. I won't forget her for a long time because Dilloway created a character whose life struggles and passions opened up whole new worlds to me.
    In her spare time Gal plunges herself into a unique hobby--rose breeding. She works feverishly to keep her roses fed, watered, fertilized and fungus free while swapping pollen and harvesting rose hips. The goal-- to create a fabulous and exotic new type of Hulthemia rose and bring it to market. But Dilloway adds another layer to Gal's life that makes her even more complicated. She's coping with life threatening kidney disease and must undergo dialysis every other day.
   What I thought was going to be a simple story about a woman who liked flowers was so much more than I expected. It thrust me into the botanist's greenhouse laboratory, the cutthroat world of rose competition, kidney disease and organ transplantation.
  And we didn't even address the side order of family dysfunction affecting Gal's life. She's got a devoted mother and father who arrive when Gal has health setbacks. She's accustomed to them, but not to her 15-year-old niece Riley. She pops up when her mother, Gal's sister Becky, heads to Asia for a long-term job assignment. Becky was healthy while Gal's childhood was marked by one health crisis after another. Gal got all the attention while Becky was on cruise-control. She became a rebellious teen, a rebellious young adult and then a single mother still battling addiction issues.
   Riley now lives with Gal and is as complex as her aunt. Her moods shift with the weather and Gal does the best she can to deliver Riley to school on time, in uniform and on point. Riley struggles with her aunt's biology course, the Science Olympiad team, friends and the long absences from her mother.
  The roses, Gal, Riley. They all have their seasons of growth, bloom and regeneration and reading Roses with Thorns was a nice blend of story and discovery. Rose breeding, a subject I've never ever contemplated, became the centerpiece of the book and I enjoyed reading about all the care and precision that's involved in creating something new in the natural world. I won't ever look at a rose the same way next time I wander through a garden center or plant nursery. It probably took years to arrive, considering its creation and time spent growing in a test garden somewhere. Also, sometimes when I go shopping I pass a dialysis center, never giving it a thought. I won't be so cavalier next time. I'll wonder how many people are inside getting their blood cleaned while waiting out a new kidney. Where are they on the list? Who is at home caring for the kids while they are connected to a machine in there?
   No surprise. I give this book a big green thumbs up. The story is satisfying. The characters are unique, and I guarantee that you'll learn a lot about subjects that are new to you.
The Push from the Book: Someone I know has a signature closing to her e-mails: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Gal's daily struggle with her failing kidney brought renal disease into my consciousness. I was going to say "off the back burner" but truthfully, it wasn't even on the stove. I cannot imagine having to plan a full life around dialysis, yet so many people must. The book made me count my blessings. Which are many.