In my small Welsh town, where the hills roll like green memories and the sheep dot the landscape like quotation marks in God’s own story, there lived an old woman named Mrs. Pritchard. Every day of her eighty-seven years, she tended her rose garden with the devotion of a saint. Hybrid teas and climbers, floribundas that bloomed like captured sunsets, old roses that remembered the breath of centuries. When the young men from the village went off to war, she sent them each a pressed rose petal in a letter. When they came home changed, or when they didn’t come home at all, they remembered her and the simple beauty of the rose petal, or didn’t. She planted new roses in remembrance of the ones that couldn’t remember.
“A rose,” her hands dark with honest dirt, “doesn’t care about your politics or your pride. It only cares about being present. That’s enough. That should be enough for all of us.”
Once Dubya 2.0 strikes the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant and fails to destroy it, will he too zip into a flight suit, land on a carrier, and declare “Mission Accomplished” before the dust has even settled? Perhaps this time, the banner will read “Mission: Pending,” fluttering above a mountain that swallowed a 30,000-pound bunker buster without flinching. And if history rhymes, we may soon be treated to another round of performative triumph, complete with choreographed optics and a conveniently vague definition of success.
Some scripts never get rewritten. They just cast new leads.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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