Smelling the Roses

One of the things I love about Sundays is that you have time to putter around and be domestic...play hausfrau.

Since it's been raining, this morning was wonderful. Cool, misty and relaxing. I like to take time in the morning to treasure a cat, so I made a cup of tea (a beautiful display tea that a friend got for me in China). Alma chose to take advantage of the situation, and continued to hang out as I puttered around the front flower bed and my tiny vegetable garden. It's one of the more enjoyable aspects of working outside - I usually have somebody or another hanging out with me in that casual cat way.

One of the saddest parts of being grown-up is that my main interaction with roses has nothing to do with appreciating their beauty or smell. Instead, they've become another responsibility. Every weekend I must dead-head my pink shrub roses. Then I compost the blossoms. Which seems sacrilegious. But what else can I do with mounds of dead and drying blossoms I prune each week?

On another note, yesterday, I went to Borders because I wanted to pick up a couple gift books (I buy all of mine used). On the discount table in front, I saw "Heimskringla or The Lives of the Norse Kings." Now that's just one of those random things one is meant to buy, if you know what I mean.

The Old Norse were amusingly different, for example, "It once happened when Odin was gone far away and had been a long time from home that his people thought he would not come back. Then his brothers took it upon themselves to divide his goods in succcession to him, but they both took to wife his spouse Frigga. But a little later Odin came home and once more took his wife to himself." There was also Fjolnir, who drowned in a beer vat.

Odin himself was a bit of a trip: "It was said that he talked so glibly and shrewdly that all who heard him must needs take his tale to be wholly true." Which explains the part about him talking to the dead, foreseeing the future and changing into animals and wandering around. Though they don't go into it in the book, I think he also may be the first person to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. He was also able to convince his followers that he was a god. So, now we know where the plot for "The Man Who Would Be King" came from. Though Odin died in his bed since he was a better shuckster than Daniel Dravot, and didn't drink as much beer as Fjolnir.

After Odin, came Niord, who was a political prisoner at the time(or rather a hostage, which was actually more of an ambassador). Anyway, there is no mention of Odin's sons - odd, no? Niord had a son and a daughter: Frey and Freya, who each successively became a ruler/god. After Freya's rule, "...they called all their noble women by her name, even as they are now called fruer; so every woman is called Freya (Frue) who rules over her own property, but she is called house-freya (husfrue), who has a household. I wonder what Freya did with her dead rose blossoms?