Violins, Roses, and Butterflies

Echoes of a Quiet November

✍️Author’s Note

This reflection grew out of a quiet November evening, when memories seemed closer than usual and the season invited a gentler kind of thinking. The violin, the roses, and the butterflies are small remnants of a life once filled with music and care. They are not valuable in the material sense, but they carry the emotions and echoes of those who shaped me. This piece is simply an attempt to honour them — and to acknowledge the quiet beauty that remains as time moves on.

November has a way of softening the world. The mornings are quieter, the light more forgiving, as if the season itself has grown reflective. Perhaps that is why this month always draws my memories to the surface more readily than any other. It is the month of my birth, once a season of early frost and the first snow. And even now, long after the climate has changed, November still carries that hush of anticipation — the pause between what has been and what is yet to come.

Among the objects that remind me of this rhythm is my mother’s violin. She was born in 1910, and before she married she was an accomplished violinist and pianist who gave occasional recitals. Her music filled the house in which my brother and I grew up — Mozart on bright days, Schubert on quiet ones, and sometimes her own melodies drifting up the stairs.

The violin rests today in its old, worn case. It has not been played for decades, and time has wrapped it gently in silence. The wood may have shifted, the bridge may have bowed, and the strings are long past their singing years. Yet when I lift it, I still feel the faint echo of her hands. The instrument seems to wait — patient, dignified — for another musician to coax life from it again.

One day, I will take it to a violin maker, not to assess its value but to give it a chance to breathe once more. And perhaps I will gift it to someone who will care for it with the same affection my mother once did. Music should not be locked away; it should continue, even if through other hands.

Outside on the balcony stand the New Dawn roses — tender, pale, endlessly forgiving. They lose their leaves now, yellow then brown, as the season requires. The wind on the third floor is unkind, the November moisture less so. Still, the roses are resilient; they surrender their colour only to store strength for the spring.

There is a kind of wisdom in watching them — a reminder that beauty has its ebb and tide. Their fading teaches me something about my own seasons, and about the quiet acceptance of time’s passage. At my age, the beginnings that come are more modest, and the colours not as bright as they once were. Yet they are beginnings all the same.

In my room there is also a wooden box of butterflies from the early 1900s, their wings pinned with the precision of another era. They lie suspended between flight and eternity — vivid once, fragile now, preserved in the stillness of time. They remind me of a belief my parents’ generation held naturally: that beauty, if handled gently enough, might outlast us.

And so here they rest:
the violin, silent but full of memory;
the roses, fading yet preparing to bloom again;
the butterflies, shimmering faintly in their stillness.

Together they form a small constellation of the lives that shaped mine.

My father, born in 1915, died in 1998. My mother followed three years later. They left us kindness, discipline, laughter, books, paintings — and a certainty that life was richer when filled with music and gardens. Now, in the winter of my life, I carry what is left in my care. Not because these objects are valuable, but because they carry emotional truths that do not fit into any ledger.

And so I feel a quiet responsibility. These things that have outlived their time — the violin, the roses, the butterflies — should be respected and gently passed on when my own leaf has fallen.

For that, too, is part of November’s lesson:
that nothing is truly lost when it is handed forward with care.
That silence holds its own music.
That beauty, fading or fragile, still has its place.
And that even in late autumn, life prepares itself for renewal.

William J J Houtzager, Aka WJJH, November 2025

📌Blog Excerpt

Violins, roses, and a small box of butterflies — three quiet remnants of a life that shaped my own. In this November reflection, I return to the objects left in my care: my mother’s long-silent violin, the fading New Dawn roses on my balcony, and the fragile wings collected more than a century ago. Each holds its own memory, its own season. Together they remind me that beauty does not vanish; it transforms. And in the soft light of November, even silence has something to say.

Leave a comment