uprooting.

garden-y perspectives on what we leave behind.

Across the street, over the course of a few short hours this morning, the neighbors’ rose garden was turned into an eight-foot by eight-foot square hole in the ground. I’m not sure if the dig was planned or an emergency measure. When he caught me looking, a man in an orange vest called down from cab of the yellow excavator: IT’S THE SEWER!

The neighbors who live there keep mostly to themselves, but the roses are less reserved, inviting conversation and fawning. On a summer night last year, when the blooms—striped David Austin varieties, nearly all of them—were particularly showy, I spotted a neighbor tending to them and crossed the street to say hello. Standing next to roses towering over our heads, she told me that they were the result of a decades-long, rose-fueled competition between her mother and her best friend who lived next door. Next door, where the garden’s now covered in a giant blue tarp.