But the sun's shining, the daisies are out, the roses look terrifically healthy, and my rosebush payments are running out.
Louis I the Pious, son of Charlemagne, founded a bishopric there in 815, an event linked with the "thousand-year-old rosebush" (probably 300 to 500 years old) that blooms above the east choir of the cathedral.
"A rose is so beautiful, but you have these thorns on a rosebush that are just vicious," he states.
Writer learned that roses are so old that some fossil traces of them have been found and that there isn't a single rose native to the Southern Hemisphere, and that by putting a fish head at the bottom of the hole you can give a rosebush a head start in life.
Even the best photos in the show (one of a woman who has dragged a tattered rosebush into her bed, another of a naked couple lying awake on a back-yard mattress, and every one of those weirdly fraught street scenes) collapse under the weight of obvious effort.
If he chooses to film his main location, the orphanage of the title, from somewhere around rosebush level, craning upward to catch it at a looming angle, and so to conjure memories of the Bates house in "Psycho," well, good for him.
Second, Tuymans discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a vitality as surprising as a rosebush on the moon.
Six years ago I buried my mother's ashes beside a young lilac that's now taller than I, and stuck the stub of a rosebush into her dirt, where like everything else not human it thrives.
There is an old, old Negro with white hair and a large white mustache here this morning "budding" a rosebush.
(Jacob brushes past Sleeping Beauty, unkissed and undiscovered, lying in a dusty, rosebush-choked castle, her gown yellowing and her skin becoming thin as parchment).
There are no real mountains, but the trail is rugged, ranging in elevation from 601 feet above sea level at the shore of Lake Superior, to 1,829 feet at Rosebush Ridge, near Canada.
