Roses in Aberdour

It was a spectacular June evening. For the previous few years I had loosely brushed shoulders with a beautiful family who now, just weeks before I left Scotland, had kindly invited me to dinner. Working within a community of 700 people, there would always be more friendship possibilities than actualities. The late discovery of treasure is still vastly preferable to an unawareness of its existence.

I traversed the Forth Road Bridge earlier than needed, to make the most of the iridescent light. Aberdour, one of Fife’s many riches. The sky was bright, the waves gently crashing, and there was a sense of something poignant lingering in the air. I quickly spotted the roses, resplendent on a rock, confidently displaying their own vibrant colour. Unashamed of standing out, they added a stunning complementary hue to the seaside palette by doing so.

On closer glance, they were not untouched by their surroundings. These flowers had been trailed in the sea. Camera in hand, I contorted myself next to the flowers upon the rock, close and personal, to capture their rightful place at the centre of the landscape. I wondered what their story was. Whether an unaccepted apology. Perhaps a bashful lover unable, in the end, to declare his love, instead bestowing the beauty of his offering upon a beach that would not reject his affections.

Photo taken, I began to amble back to my car, dinner on my mind. I happened to glance at a pattern in the sand, an intricate print of a shoe. Spirals and flowers. I was delighted that a designer had thought to add beauty to a side of shoe naturally unseen, but quickly turned my thoughts to legacy. I wondered whether the shoe wearer had any idea that where they had walked left a lasting impression. That everywhere their foot trod, beauty lingered.

Back at the car I dusted down my shoes – and laughed at the familiar pattern. It seems the shoe wearer had been oblivious after all.

Over dinner I discovered a family who would undoubtedly have become fellow sojourners had we ‘met’ sooner. And I learnt that there had been a funeral that day of a young person from the village. Taken much too soon, and missed by so many. Ah. The flowers. I thought again of legacy. Of the way this young person’s life had touched so many. Of the fact that we all leave footprints, visible or invisible.

As I crossed back over the bridge, I was pensive and grateful. I could lament the bitter sweet nature of friendship, found too late. Instead, I chose gratitude that we had built friendship at all, however much the tides of change may seek to wash it away. Gratitude for the way these new found friends had left glad patterns on my soul. Inspired by footprints and flowers, I chose gratitude for the life I have, the places I had trod and would yet tread, and other footprints that had yet to take their place alongside my own. And I determined never again to assume the story behind a rose, or to take my life for granted.