Dogwood Blossoms by Clara Edna Rosencrans

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 24, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 11.

Dogwood Blossoms

By Clara Edna Rosencrans

It was a bright spring day. The city was ahum with busy life. Street-cars clanged their bells as pedestrians crossed the tracks, and motor-trucks and autos whirred past, making the air discordant with their shrill gongs.

On the steps of a beautiful mansion on Sutherland Street stood a middle-aged woman. Her dress was plain and poor, her face plainer, and she walked with a crutch. Suddenly, as she rang the bell, her eyes rested on a bunch of dogwood blossoms in a vase close beside the door. She stood gazing as though fascinated, and her face lighted up, as thoughts of youthful days will sometimes lighten a face otherwise commonplace and unattractive. The city street faded away. The noise and bustle were almost unheard. The poor cripple was back again in the little log cabin with father and mother.

It was evening, and the sun was sinking behind the hills, while the little valley was bathed in shadow. A narrow path wound down the deep shelving hillside toward a spring; and all along this path, filling in the spaces between the dark green of the ash and the tenderer and more vivid emerald of the maple and hazel, grew the shadowy white blossoms of the dogwood. Quiet and stillness and perfect peace reigned there—a stillness in which could be heard the plaintive call of the whippoorwill and the vesper song of the brown thrush; a stillness also in which one could think of God and get near to heaven. Here in the sad past she had read much and dreamed more. Here days had been spent in writing, while she imagined that sometime her name might be at least acknowledged outside the valley.

Alas for human hopes! While she had secured some local recognition, yet the major part of her old-time dreams were yet unrealized.

There was no bitterness now as she thought of this and her disappointment; but back into her heart came the blessedness of that time when she had known her name written in the book of life; when, bereft of father and mother, she had found a loving heavenly Father, and had known that soon she would have a home with Him.

How little time it takes to dip deep into the past!

She was suddenly aroused to the fact that the bell had not been answered, and she must go. She glanced again lovingly at the dogwood blossoms, and wished it were right for her to take one; but as she could not satisfactorily convince herself of that, she went down the steps smiling—with a look of vision on her face.

What did it matter that she was poor and lonely, and that disease had maimed her life? She "knew in whom she had believed," and that she was an heir to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled; knew, too, that life was beautiful and replete and satisfying, since a bunch of wild flowers—plucked perhaps by a childish hand—could give her a moment of such unalloyed pleasure.

What if sad memories were mingled with the dreams of the old days? The snowy blossoms of the dogwood were but a background against which were imaged father, mother, home, and all that those sweet words imply.

"Dreams," you say. Yes, for is not a great deal of life made up of dreams? The reality will come when we awake to the fulness of the life beyond.

Clara Edna Rosencrans.