The landscapers arrive in three big, shiny white pickup trucks pulling trailers laden with all sorts of lawn equipment. The “FOR SALE” sign swings lazily, a haphazard red “SOLD” taped across. Mowers, weed whackers, garbage cans, and a ton of other stuff I can’t put a name to rattle and shake as the brigade parks by the curb in front of my grandmother’s home. It’s a chilly June morning, the sun making its slow ascent up the sky, the temperatures in the mid-sixties. I stand by the front door, arms crossed in a big, loose blue cardigan, waiting for them. I had hoped they wouldn’t show up.

Yet here they are, dutiful and punctual. Never one to miss an appointment or the opportunity to get paid, I suppose.

The head landscaper (I assume) hops out of the passenger seat of the first pickup, wearing a faded dusty red ball cap. His leathered, tan skin stretched over arms that has carried hundreds of mulch bags and a face with a smile fine-tuned to winning over clients.

_He’s one of the best_, my mother said in reassuring tones, _he will make sure everything is done right. _My muscles tense as her clipped words ring through my mind, like tin pots falling to a stone floor.

The man approaches confidently, his face split in half with a smile and a hand outstretched, hanging in the air. I squeeze my arms before stiffly meeting his. He eagerly crushes my hand and pumps my arm up and down.

“The name’s Ron, great to meet you!”

My lips tighten. “Mary.”

“It’s a pleasure, Mary.” He releases my hand, which drops to my side, and he nods his head to the house. “Are we starting out back?”

I cross my arms tight over my chest again. I nod.

His eyes glow and his cheeks turn round as fresh blossomed apples. “Alright then, we will get to it. Give us two hours and we’ll be out of your hair!”

Two hours. I suppose that’s what it takes to dismantle the remains of deepest love’s physical expression.

Ron darts away to the back of the house and I watch as his crew begins loading up equipment on their shoulders and pushing the mowers up the small hill. One crew stays in the front yard with a mower and weed eater, carefully unscrewing gas caps and filling the tanks to the brim. Their breath leaves their mouths in thin puffs as they work to start the equipment and level the two-foot-tall weed field my grandmother’s yard has become.

My mind goes blank as I watch, tall weeds falling to the ground beneath motorized scythes. Men’s laughter wafts up as they share in stories and inside jokes I’ll never know. Jokes the weeds carry to their graves.

My fingers curl into numb fists as I turn to head to the back of the house. The sickly sweet and bitter smell of fresh cut grass hits my nose as chilly air pushes into my face. I bump the worn fence door open, my feet balancing on uneven stone pavers that lead the way to the back.

The petals of roses, lavenders, and daisies glisten with early morning dew and sway in a lazy breeze. The pink, purple, and bright yellow petals face the sun, eager for morning rays to nourish them. Little thorns stick out on the stems of the roses, thorns that once drew blood on my soft, childhood skin for years.

My grandmother’s chuckle echoes in my ears. _When will she learn she can’t play with roses?_

My grandfather’s soft chuckle in return as he places his cigar pipe on the garden table and picks up the newspaper. The gentle rustle of the pages when he flips open the paper and I sit in the grass, crying over a pricked thumb. My grandmother, kneeling tenderly before me, a smell of coffee, peonies, and pie, stretching a bandaid across the cut.

Ron walks resolutely across the yard with a big, heavy pair of shears in his hands. The blades alone are at least three feet long. His partner parks a metal wheelbarrow that’s marked with stiff mud by the edge of the floral garden. His weedeaters and mower sit beside the wheelbarrow, waiting.

Ron makes a remark, something about how the flowers need to be tended to before he can start the mower. The thick stems or the weeds or whatever could choke the mower. If the mower is choked, it’ll break. A monetary figure of a couple thousand dollars flashes briefly in my eyes. I’m sure replacing a choked mower would be an absolute tragedy for Ron.

Ron points around the yard and garden to me, but I don’t see him. I walk up to the edge of the flowerbed and kneel down beside the roses. Tears gather at the edges of my eyelids, threatening to spill. I sniffle and reach my hand out to the pink petals. My fingertips brush against velvet and cool dew. The rose dances at my touch. The stem is thick and the base is obscured in wild, tangled weeds. I stare in amazement at the garden that still came into bloom after two years of neglect.

From the corner of my eye I catch Ron walking over to the far side of the garden. He’s stooped low, shoulders rhythmic in work as he moves the shears through the thicket. His partner is right behind, flattening weeds with the whacker. The distant hum of the motor pulls my eyes towards them, and I watch as one by one, roses fall to the earth. Ron tosses them into the wheelbarrow behind him without looking up.

I stand and make my way to the rusted, green garden table with its two matching chairs, positioned to face the garden and rising sun. I sit at the chair my grandmother frequented, looking over at the other that my grandfather left empty more than ten years ago.

He bought these roses for her. Decades ago. She was eighty-six at her passing, and he had purchased her first rose seventy-one years prior.

When they first met, my grandmother was a fifteen-year-old school girl, balancing books on spindle legs that wobbled in stout heeled uniform shoes. He was a rowdy seventeen-year-old senior on the school football team. He would tell this story with bemusement and self-indulgence; _all_ the cheerleaders on the squad wanted him. But, grandma wasn’t on the cheer squad. She wasn’t even on the bleachers. She was the girl walking hurriedly down the hall, pushing giant glasses up the bridge of her nose because she couldn’t be late to trigonometry.

It was her mystery that pulled him in. He was puzzled she wasn’t obsessing over him (or any other boy on the football team, for that matter). He was so used to female attention, and this stick figure of a girl wasn’t giving him any.

_I wasn’t interested in boys. _The word “boys” would drop from Grandma’s mouth like a toxic paperweight. _That doesn’t matter to a boy interested in girls though_.

It was this disinterest that let Grandma to miss all the signs. Grandpa would time his movements so that he was standing right there by the classroom door at dismissal. However, Grandma would brush by him, sometimes giving him a shy smile, other times not seeing him at all. She would either rush to the library, the lunchroom, or down the street back home.

I remember squealing at the story. _Whyyyyy?_

Grandma, smoothing my hair down. I was maybe seven when they first told me the story. _I wanted to study and be smart. I had bigger things in mind._ Grandpa rolled his eyes and giggles erupted out of me.

Grandpa eventually figured out that if he wanted Grandma’s attention, he was simply going to have to walk up and grab it.

So, he visited the flower shop, bought a single rose for a nickel, and marched back to the school. He knew she was about to get out of trigonometry class, never mind that he skipped grammar in order to get this flower. And there he stood, in the center of the hallway, holding up the rose with a smile.

The tin bell rang in the halls and the door was pushed open by excited and hurried teenagers. Most of the girls noticed the handsome, young athlete standing there with a single rose, taunting him and flirting, trying to get the rose to be theirs. He ignored them, his eyes and smile set straight ahead.

The muscles on his face automatically pulled upward, his eyes shining and expectant. Grandma emerged, head bowed, fingers pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, thick books jumbled in her arms. The crowd of disappointed girls thinned and Grandma almost bumped into Grandpa. She wasn’t used to him being right there in the center of the hallway. Usually he was on the side, out of sight and out of mind.

She stopped short and looked up at him, seeing the broad smile and the beautiful rose, with its white petals winged in coral.

“Beatrice,” he drawled, “will you go out with me?” He extended the rose.

Grandma was hesitant. She had never been asked out by a boy before. The corners of her mouth turned down and her face scrunched. Her eyes searched his.

“Sh-sure,” she stammers. The books in her arms shuffled into the left elbow, and her stiff and awkward rigth hand extended, accepting the rose.

Grandpa’s heart was dancing, butterflies doing somersaults exuberantly in his stomach. He gave her a single nod. “Great. I’ll pick you up at 8.”

They stood there for a moment longer, Grandma’s lips curling upward, her cheeks reddening.

They married when she was eighteen and he was being pulled into a furious and deadly war. Their wedding was a small and cheap one, the couple neither having money nor means to pull off a grand affair. Nor did they have the time. They signed their love into law before a handful of parents, cousins, and siblings and spent a day in honeymoon together before Grandpa was shipped off to war.

The morning of his departure, grandma woke, the aroma of fresh coffee wafting steadily into the bedroom. She was alone in bed. She threw on a robe and padded curiously to the kitchen.

Fresh steaming mugs of coffee were placed on the wooden kitchen table with a square of paper in the center. An arrow had been penciled on the paper, pointing to the backdoor. Curiously she moved, her feet a meer whisper on the cold tiles. She pushed the door open, craning her neck around the frame. Wild birds sang sweetly in the warm air.

Fresh dug earth lay in brown heaps in the garden before her, the smell of dirt filling her face. In the center of the soft brown soil stood three small rose bushes.

A gasp escaped her lips, and Grandma, clutching her robe across her chest, hurried out the door where she knelt beside the bushes. Her face glowed, tender young fingers brushing over bright green tight buds of roses that wouldn’t bloom for a few more months.

“So you won’t ever forget about me.”

The voice was sudden and unexpected. Grandma whirled around to see Grandma smiling down at her from the back door, mug of coffee raised to his lips. His brown eyes sparkled as he watched her. The other mug was waiting in his hand for her to take.

Grandma’s breath quickened, her hands dropping from the bushes and forgetting the rob. Her cheeks ached from her smile. She rushed to Grandpa, throwing her arms around his neck in a warm and tight embrace. He looped his arms around her back, kissing tears from her cheeks. He backed up in to the house, placed the mugs on the table, and led her to the bedroom.

He wouldn’t return for over two years.

When he did, he came back to a flowing garden of fragrant pinks, purples, and reds, and Grandma, who waited by with two mugs of steaming coffee.

That very garden saw them through years of life and love, through eight children and six grandchildren. Through the death of family, the celebrations of life, the changing world and the twenty-first century. Through sickness and health, and through my grandmother’s long and lonely eight years as a widow.

When grandpa had passed, she had picked a single rose, petals white and dusted at the tips with magenta, laying it over his tired hands clasped across his chest. She continued to tend the roses when she returned from the funeral.

When grandma passed, no one had been by the garden to send her off with a rose. Not a single one.

And for two years following her death, not a single person hadcared for the yard, or the house, or the flowers, whom continued to bloom patiently every spring.

An ache settles in my soul as Ron efficiently tosses rose after rose into the wheelbarrow. He’s almost done now, the rectangle of earth that held this garden for well over half a century feeling the full rays of the sun for the first time. My chest grows heavy. _Why didn’t I come out here more? Why didn’t I take care of Grandma’s roses?_

My nose starts to grow stuffy. I swipe a finger under my eyes. Ron straightens up, sheers tossed to the ground. The garden is empty, dark dry dirt exposed like a deep gash, loud and sore. Ron’s helper tames the rest of the yard with the mower, the steady hum of the motor pulling me back.

I drift absently over to the wheelbarrow, staring down at the pile of dead roses and chopped weeds. Tears slip from my eyes and soak my cheeks. I reach down and pick up a rose, twirling it in my fingers. I turn, pushing through the fence door. The front lawn is neatly manicured now, matching the neighbor’s. I walked through the center of the soft, short grass and slide into my car.

On the passenger seat lay a photo album, the smiling youthful faces of Grandma and Grandpa taped to the front. Above them were gold, cursive words. _Life Together_.

A tepid smile appears through the tears that are now splashing over my lap and onto the cover. I open the album to the center, among pictures of the two of them holding their first child, my mother. I place the rose and close the book over it, pressing the covers together.

I shift the car in gear and drive away from my grandparent’s home for the last time.