In front of the house there had been a dead tree. Its bark had long scaled off, leaving it white and bare and raw. A rosebush had fancied it the spot to make its new home and entwined itself around its tall stature—spawning myriads of bright pink blossoms every year, imbuing the air around the house with the scent of summer. There were so many of them that every visitor would get a bouquet of roses, should they want one, and sometimes I would feed one or two flowers to the iguana.
…
I turn around the corner and reluctantly step onto the street. I used to live here. This is weird. Nothing has changed. The narrow street is lined with the same neatly cut hedges, behind which the deceivingly friendly dwellers of this village lurk. It’s quiet, eerie, just like it had always been, back then. I keep walking towards the house, each step slower than the one before—
…and there it is. A low, wooden fence, and behind it the cowering, red brick stone structure, a lonely, garishly green watering can, and a bench that wasn’t there before. The dead tree must have had to yield to a neatly mowed lawn, and the scent of summer has long since faded away.
[214 words]
(c) 2019 Anett Enzmann
five stray minutes 
I am just going to put this as a comment:
As I went looking for a picture of that rosebush I found that the harddrive I kept all these on, had crashed due to, I believe, a mischievous cat incident a few weeks ago), so it is now truly gone. Seeing that it has been cut down was bad enough yesterday, but now every picture of the house and the flowers has disappeared, and I turly don’t know how I feel about that.
So the title picture is a rather generic one I took years later, and yes, these are obviously not roses, but they bear a similar kind of memory.
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Really liked your piece – resonated with your closure and returning to a special place only to find it no longer exists.
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It sent a shiver down my spine: places grow empty without us. Nicely done!
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Thank you, Allison! I found it quite difficult to put the strangeness of this expedition into a few short paragraphs, I am glad I seemed to have managed that! (I might do a follow-up piece, I haven’t decided yet.)
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I really enjoyed reading this. Each night, to help me go to sleep I imagine myself wandering into a place I once knew well, examining all the things in turn in their places until I fall asleep. Places and things keep pieces of us and it is hard to return later in real,life and find how they have changed.
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Indeed! And this place has so many memories (pleasant and haunting alike) that I found it quite sad to find that the one truly beautiful thing there had been cut down. The flowers (and their scent) had sort of anchored me to the house, so maybe it’s time now for me to cut ties with it.
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Leaving always seems to be hard. May you find lots of roses along your way.
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