For as long as I can remember, there has been a house in town that has a beautiful yard lined with rose bushes and bearing a beautiful hand-painted sign that reads “Stop and Smell the Roses.”. I found out a few years ago that a friend of mine and his special lady friend take care of the lady who lives there because she is starting to get up there in years and was starting to have a hard time getting all the work done around the house and yard. Well, I was driving by that house the other day and was shocked to see that all of the rose bushes were gone. The lack of roses is not really the thing that shocked and saddened me as much as the replacement of “Stop and Smell the Roses.” sign with an orange and black commercial “No Trespassing.” sign. My heart sank in my chest. Something that I had seen for years, and taken for granted for years, that was a beacon of hope and goodness in the world, was now gone and was replaced with its opposite. It was like the day that I heard that Ed Walker’s forgot to renew their license that allowed them to serve beer directly to your car, the last license of it’s kind in the state, if not the country. Beer?! To your car?! People are shocked that we have bars that stay open until 5:00am as well. Well, there’s not really much else to do here. Except, maybe, hang out in WAL?MART. Oh, wait, focus. Right. The point is, that is a sad day when something that is such a staple of our local “culture”, I’ll use that term loosely, stops existing. Granted, it could be something that is ridiculously out dated, but come now, this is Arkansas. We just realized that there is an economic recession. There are people here that still really believe that the South will rise again. It is not terribly unheard of to have something here that is trapped in time. Like Irish Maid Donuts. You could still smoke in there until last year and coffee was still 30¢. But, like the roses sign and Ed Walker’s license, the day the “No Smoking” sign went up in Irish Maid was a blow against our collective resistance to a changing world. Those type of oddities are what makes this town what it is, this weird quaint little black hole in time and space where drive-in diners still bring beer to your car and you can smoke a cigarette while eating a maple bar and drinking bad coffee that you can still pay for by sliding two coins across the Formica counter top. And once in a while, you can stop, and smell the roses. More soon. ~SC