A Single Remaining Rose

Recently, Matt went on a Faulkner marathon at bedtimes, reading sections aloud when the mood struck.  Last weekend, we spotted this late-season rose — undaunted, determined, the last on the bush — and recalled this passage:

There was a rose, a single remaining rose. Through the sad, dead days of late summer it had continued to bloom, and now though persimmons had long swung their miniature suns among the caterpillar-festooned branches, and gum and maple and hickory had flaunted two gold-and-scarlet weeks, and the grass, where grandfathers of grasshoppers squatted sluggishly like sullen octogenarians, had been pencilled twice delicately with frost, and the sunny noons were scented with sassafras, it still bloomed. Overripe now, and a little gallantly blowsy, like a fading burlesque star.

- William Faulkner, from Flags in the Dust (1929)