The city of roses

The winter was harsher than what people could remember. The temperature kept falling and the sun seemed to have forever hidden in his castle, with no intention to come and visit his friends, the playful clouds, even for a quick hide and seek onto the grey yard of the sky.

Life kept running in its daily errands, covered in a blanket of depression. Time had already sent the order for the weather to be milder, but the command had been neglected. The calendar was in March, yet the freezing cold did not leave its fortress.

The older ones had started narrating stories from the past, referring to the myth which claimed that one day the Mother Earth would be captivated by winter forever.

'It's happening' they kept saying in their trembling voice, whispering the unspoken fearful truth to each other. However, all the rest denied listening to them. They kept on getting dressed warm enough, going to their jobs, renewing their to-do lists and making sure they earn their living the best way they can, making dreams for more luxuries, comforts and richness.

Only the roses had started being really worried. The roses and the very few ones who still had them. You see, the city had been deprived of its trees or any other kind of vegetation apart from its roses. Roses were the only plants, which had been considered important, since they added value in the beauty of the females of the city. All bouquets used in any kind of celebration were out of roses. Every kind of decoration that mattered and meant a great deal to the inhabitants was performed with the contribution of roses. All other plants were artificial. Perfect plants in their illusionary existence, but exclusively used for the non -special services. They all stood in the interior or exterior of big, glossy company buildings, in the artificial parks and in play- yards. The manufactured plants ranked like proud soldiers in a perfect order onto the pavements of each street of the city and its highway, its only bridge of connection to the rest of the world.

The artificial reality had been voted as the best no-time consuming and money-saving choice. What is the need to have any real plants when everything can be perfect, in the right size, in the desired color, in the right posture? The City’s council founded two brand new factories, which manufactured the perfect plants, the perfect trees, the perfect herb pills.

The roses were the only ones which had been left untouched and into an invulnerable state. No one could really say in certainty how it happened or which was the real reason why roses had been saved from this artificial obsession; an obsession dominating gradually more and more fields of life. Nevertheless, people seemed to be more preoccupied with admiring them and enjoying their smell, rather than the source of their survival. Roses were the flowers that reminded them how a flower can smell or what it feels like to highlight beauty in a ‘natural’ way.

Roses had ended up being the habitants’ only connection to a natural flowers’ aroma. A connection, which had developed autonomously into something deeper for every single one. An especially powerful bond for the ones who owned them and took care of them trying to have enough roses for the needs of the city. Now these connections were under threat; all existing rosebushes were under extinction due to the persistence of this current winter, which insists on remaining hooked upon every consecutive day of March.

The rosebushes in June's garden woke up every day, turning their look up into the sky, hoping to see at least a sunbeam. Still the winter kept painting the sky grey and black, leaving no freedom to the nature's paintbrush to shed some shades of blue. The roses, shivering in the cold, wondered in agony how they could keep on living and sprouting if winter stayed like that. They kept bowing their thin buds, trying to nestle up onto their exhausted by the frozen winds stems. They felt numb and motionless. Their sorrow and anxiety had started knitting a suffocating atmosphere spreading all over. June had never given up on her roses. Although it was getting harder and harder to combine her job demands with the responsibility to look after her rose garden, which provided the entire city’s weddings and festivals, she had not once complained. June had been known for her silence and discreet smile as her typical greeting. Her roses were her closest friends to whom she talked and talked and talked in hours sharing her thoughts about everything. ‘Our conversations are their best fertilizer’ she would say proudly every time they complimented her on the bouquets with which she provided the city.

In the third floor of the emergency cases into the hospital downtown, there was a rosebush into a huge clay pot onto the balcony. Nurses used to offer each one of the patients a rose trying to remind them that they are still alive and beauty is their companion into their journey. All those hospitalized in this third floor had survived fatal accidents. Most of them would need many months in physiotherapy to regain partially their physical capacities and counselling to deal with the fact that their natural looks could never again be the same. Still, a rose offered to them always managed to bring a smile onto their faces and help them get some courage into going on with their ‘new’ lives. Nurses had agreed to be responsible for this rosebush since they knew that it did miracles for their patients. Their work duties were insurmountable but they had found a way to allocate the duty among them for watering.

Even the rosebushes of Benny, which had always kept their first place among all the others of the city, in terms of their lush, flourishing state, had surrendered into a wizening remain which brought to mind the dry, wizened skin of very old people, a skin carved by deep wrinkles, a skin thirsty for some freshness. Benny’s mother was the only wise one to give the right advice to each one who still kept roses in their gardens or yards or flowerpots. Everybody called her with her nickname, ‘our doctor of roses’. Even now after three years of her loss, after this terrible car accident, no one apart from her only son, Benny, could remember her first name. Benny had painted on her grave a tufted rosebush and engraved her nickname replacing the word ‘roses’ with their painted image.

‘Mum; oh my dear mum, how can I save them?’ Benny exclaimed inside him into despair and anxiety.

June, the nurses and Benny had decided to meet and see if there is anything they could do in order to save their roses. Unfortunately, the Mayor seemed preoccupied with the visit of a famous photographer who would come to capture their city’s ability to maintain such a perfection in its looks through its artificial reality.

‘I feel like every heart’s beat is following the enthusiasm for the fame this photographer will bring to the city’ June said in a low, sad, cracked voice.

‘We have no heart beat anymore’ the nurses said. ‘Two days ago this little girl who got accidentally burnt and has entered our floor, stopped eating. She gave us this post-it: Please let me die. I see nothing beautiful’.

‘I am trying to think what mummy would do; but I do not have a clue’ Benny said. 'The only thing I can think of is to build a greenhouse, over our rosebushes and then we can put all the flowerpots we have into it.'

‘This would mean the Mayor’s approval on the cost though. How willing are they really to integrate it into their budget?’ Benny kept on.

The question started going up into the night sky trembling like a newly born bird waiting impatiently for its first feathers to come out and warm it. They all knew the policies. They all knew there was no way for any money to be spent onto plant projects. They had to find a way to find the money they would need on their own.

They parted setting their next meeting after 3 days, so as to see if they could manage to find a solution. The night was starless. Their lone, matchless companion on their way back home, the cloudy moon, shed drops of tears watching them in their despair and sadness. Gold drops of tears, which froze into the icy, raw, biting winter atmosphere, started giving their melancholy light to these helpless souls who were losing their foremost love, their natural roses.

June entered and went straight ahead to the door out in the garden. She took off her gloves; she touched the heartbroken buds of her rosebushes exhaling her inner breath onto them in an effort to offer them some warmth.

‘Others think I have no voice, I have no opinion. You know. You know what it feels like to lose your zeal to talk when the love of your life stops listening to his heart’s voice. You know because you have been listening to my bitter complaint all these years. And you have witnessed the heart, which stopped being heard in front of his decision to be progressive, modern and a supporter of artificiality, modernity and money making. You remember how we used to look after you both of us. Then one day he decided to let it go. I decided to keep on loving and stayed here looking after you. You are my own way of not losing the memory of what it is like to find another soul to love and care for; even if it is not meant to be experienced for long’. Jane’s soft touch resisted the biting whip of the strong night wind. She hugged herself into her coat and both her palms stayed touching the weak buds.

Down in the city center, one of the nurses heard the call of a patient; She ran and to her surprise it was the girl, the burnt girl who had sworn to never taste anything again. ‘I can’t sleep. The flowerpot outside in the balcony suffers. I got burnt of heat; it is being burnt out of cold. Please bring it next to me’. The nurse’s eyes watered but she went and brought the flowerpot next to the devastated girl.

‘We are so much alike’ the girl told the rosebush into the flowerpot. ‘If only you could blossom. It could mean that my desire to live could probably blossom as well?’ she asked while putting her bandaged palm onto the lanky, dry branches of the rosebush.

A bit far away at the outskirts of the city, Benny had just reached home. He had inherited the biggest rose garden of his mum. He went out into the deep darkened garden. He shut his eyes trying to bring the image of his mum while pruning her rosebushes.

‘How many smells can a rose have?’ his mum asked him and he stared at her in this puzzled look.

‘Oh mum, I do not know. I mean, don’t they all have the same smell?’

‘Do they? Each rose has its own unique aroma, the aroma of being alive, the aroma of its individual beauty’.

‘Where is their aroma now? I can’t smell anything mum. How can I keep the memory of a smell mum? How?’ Benny kept asking while walking among his rosebushes touching them with his frosted hands.

          People do not really remember what woke them up the following morning. One thing is for sure though. No alarm sound was heard. The early chirping of birds was the only sound heard. Never before had the city hosted so many real birds. But the most extraordinary of all was the flood of roses.

Every corner, every empty space of the city had a blossomed rosebud!

A flowery river, full of stunning roses had expanded all over. People looked amazed all around them. The colors, the smells, the beauty started awakening their souls.

‘Where is the winter?’ children started asking, unable to believe their luck to play lightly dressed into the sunlight.

The winter had been indeed harsher than what people could remember. But it was also the quickest winter in speed of leaving his throne. He had left overnight!

Either a lie or the truth, who can really tell? Yet, that is the way the story of the city of roses goes.