Rose of Sharon, Rosasharn

I can never see a Rose of Sharon growing wild beside the road without thinking Rosasharn.

Not Rose of Sharon. Rosasharn.

That was the pronunciation of Rose of Sharon Joad’s name in “The Grapes of Wrath.” I read the book in high school and hated it. Hated it in the particular way teenagers can hate books that adults insist are Important.

Everyone was miserable. Everyone was hungry. People died. There was poverty and dust and desperation and then—because apparently things weren’t bleak enough already—more poverty, dust and desperation.

And there was Rosasharn.

She was pregnant, hyperfocused on being pregnant, and somehow I was furious with her for it. The Joads were falling apart around her and she seemed so completely absorbed in the tiny world of her own body that I wanted to shake her.

I was, of course, a teenager.

Anyway.

The funny thing is that I liked the name, or rather, its pronunciation.

Rosasharn.

It felt beautiful in the way some mountain words feel beautiful—not polished, exactly, but fitted to the mouth and the place. The way we say holler instead of hollow, sarvis berry instead of serviceberry.

Words get changed when they live somewhere long enough.

And there was something soft and extravagant about the name Rosasharn.

Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) grows around here in places where nobody seems to have made any particular effort to put it. Beside roads. Along old fences. At the edges of fields. Among all the ordinary green and gold mess of late summer.

When they bloom they seem almost indecently generous about it—great handfuls of flowers, one after another.

There is something lovely about beauty that isn’t being staged, about language that fits the people and the land.

A flower growing beside the road doesn’t know that it is beside the road. It isn’t trying to improve the view. It isn’t waiting for anyone to notice it.

And there it is anyway.

Beautiful to me, a gift fitted well to an audience of one.

Rose of Sharon, so lovely.

Rosasharn, a beautifully-shaped name, despite an angry long-ago teenager.