The Last Rose

My rugosa rose bush has given her all this year. I robbed her of her rose hips, and she did not complain. I stole her sweetest scents, and she kept blooming. This is her last rose.
How we proclaim over the first blossoms of the season! How we dance in glee in the first snow of the year! How we ooh and aah over the first born.

What about the last rose?

In college, I wrote a poem once about a March snow, about how we neglect it, are indifferent to it, indeed, how it angers us and we are ready for it to be GONE. We resent the last snows. Hopefully we don't feel this way about the final rose of the season -- just as beautiful as the first one, and perhaps moreso, because this bush is looking languid, turning brown. Surely its energies are dissipating. Yet it puts forth one more burst of beautiful enthusiasm. A lesson to us not to disdain final things?

And how I've enjoyed my patio wysteria this year! I've tended it along for 4 years, and finally this year it really bloomed and FINALLY put out seed pods! I'd never seen a wysteria seed pod before. They are amazing -- they feel exactly like velvet, they remain hanging for months, and feel as delicious to the fingertips in October as they did in July. Like velvet, I tell you!

Yesterday I obeyed my conscience and went outside to trim some long-overdue bushes. They were as bad as teenaged boys needing haircuts!

Before:
After:
I must say, I came mighty close to cutting these 2 azaleas down to nubbin trunks about 1 foot tall. (The bushes you see here are as tall as I am.) I didn't, b/c I don't want them to look horrible if we need to move and sell/rent the house. But I sure thought about it! What do you think? Should I?