It sounds like relations with your brother aren't so great, either, or else he has a bad conscience about his wife's behavior. For the sake of family peace, I'd be tactful, but I'd be clear and firm: express a willingness to share cuttings and explain how to get them to root, but make it clear that your sister-in-law is not to take cuttings without your permission, so that she doesn't damage rare and vulnerable plants. It might help if you explain that these roses didn't come for the nearest big box store, as lagomorphmom said. If you can work in an implication that she'll have a better garden in the long run if she has you as a friend and gardening ally rather than as an enemy, so much the better, but unfortunately a lot of people don't understand this line of reasoning. Good luck!! Melissa

Yep yep yep. You are lovely friends, giving a party in honor of your friends who got married. You are being careful not to make the slightest suggestion that anyone expects guests to buy gifts, or even any acknowledgement that they might. Also, don't worry about whether to call it a post-wedding reception or something like that. In fact, if I were doing this, I would just word the invitation something like, "Please come to/You are invited to to/Mary Smith requests the pleasure of your company at [or whatever the formality of the occasion dictates] a party in honor of Cuthbert and Petunia Jones [or Cuthbert Miller and Petunia Jones, if they have different last names, or I guess also if the invitations go out before she changes her name]/date/time/place" You don't even have to mention anything about the wedding on the invitation. I wouldn't. Anyone close enough to invite to the part presumably knows that they are getting married, and that's obviously why you are honoring them. The less you refer to it on the invitation, the less likely anyone will think that the idea is to rustle up some gifts. But it seems to me that anyone as nice as you probably travels in a circle that doesn't assume nastiness, and the invitees' response will be more like, "Oh, isn't that nice of Mary to do that. I'm glad we'll all get to celebrate, even though it's going to be a small wedding. I wish I'd thought of it myself." I don't see anything wrong with this even if they had had a big wedding. So there! :-)

You could also maybe give your friends a break. I had a close friend who was very self involved. I told her three times what I wanted her to do (come see my very big project). She had time. She was in the area. She made really lame excuses why she didn't. Then she moved away with no notice and instead of calling me where she knew I'd be, she left a message on my answering machine saying the only time I could see them before they left was at a party they were having during my work hours. I didn't know how to respond and the advice I got was "who says you have to?" Then she wrote some letters without one word inquiring or commenting about me. Not the 2nd grade "How are you?" that we're taught to open with. We've been in touch a few times since, but I basically dropped her. I regret it. I know I needed to do it rather than be hurt by her, and I have better friends, but I do miss her and I wish I could have just let it slide and accepted that that's the way she was. Another friend stopped talking to me because I didn't understand what she needed from me after a death in her family. I didn't know why until at least a decade later, when she got back in touch, briefly (I'm guessing a therapist told her to mend fences). When she told me, she mentioned that she'd done what she needed for herself for me when my uncle had died. I didn't know that she was doing it so couldn't pattern it. It wasn't articulated that that's what one does (in her lights) when someone loses a family member. I would have tried. I miss her too. I have closer and better friends, but I wish she could have explained or accepted, and given me a break.

This has turned out to be a much more interesting discussion than I dreamed! What fascinating stories you all tell … family histories are so often rife with astonishing tales, aren’t they? I’m glad that so many of you understand what I was getting at in my OP. I find that particularly as I age, I long to know more about those who came before me. I have done some genealogical work, as did my grandmother many years ago, and at least we know where our forebears on both sides came from (for the most part). It has long been rumored that there is Native American ancestry in my family, but we have been unable to pinpoint that exactly, and I’d love to know for sure. Anyway, this discussion prompted me to take out the very old photo album that was in my aunt’s possession before she passed away. It contains photos of my ancestors going back to the Spanish-American War, and is something I desperately need to preserve. (Right now, it’s in an album that is falling apart at the seams.) Part of the trouble that so many young people seem to have is in envisioning the old people in their lives as young people themselves. My maternal grandmother was always “old” to me … even when she was in her 50s, she seemed quite old. Shortly before she died, I learned that she had been on a girls’ basketball team when she was a teenager. Imagine! My “old” grandmother, who was overweight and crippled with arthritis, a basketball player! I also came into possession of some photos of her as a girl that I had never seen before, and it truly put her in a whole new light. She was once young. She was once vibrant with quite likely very similar hopes and dreams to those that I had. If it’s so “easy” to relegate those that we KNOW to the time and place in which we know them, then it’s all the easier to do so when it comes to historical figures (or even just everyday people from the past) that we do not. I’m really going to make an effort to try to think of those “bygone folks” as wholly human and not merely characters – or worse, caricatures. The book I’m reading on Billy the Kid delves into the difficulties of frontier life in the 1800s, and talks of how devastating tuberculosis was at the time. On our recent trip to New Mexico, we visited a national monument near Las Cruces where the ruins of an old sanitarium stood. We also saw a house in Lincoln that had been set up as a sort of makeshift ward for “consumptive” patients. It’s mind-boggling to think of how many died from that terrible disease, and the lengths that those who survived went to in order to overcome. I too wonder if the difficulties of just making it to a ripe old age impacted how people thought and talked and otherwise conducted themselves on a day-to-day basis. I have to think they probably had a much stronger grasp of “not sweating the small stuff” than we do in our modern, technologically-advanced era.