'They Say You Can Never Go Back But You Try' by S A Greene

You arrive at the holiday cottage you rented when they were small and you drop your bags, make straight for the garden with the picnic table where you fed them carrot sticks and Pringles to get them out your way for a minute but the picnic table’s gone, leaving a round table and chairs in its place, and you understand, welcome it even, because let’s face it sitting on that bench against the slope hurt your back, but then you see the dark leggy shrubs that you’re sure weren’t there before when the garden was a bare sloping lawn with clear views of the sea and sky and wide fields, and you don’t understand – surely shrubs can’t grow that large since you were last there, spreading out across the lawn, concealing bluebelled clearings which are charming enough, but difficult to reach along the narrow paths crowded by the bushes - and then it hits you it was twenty years ago, and much can grow in twenty years, and you resent an unremembered clump of periwinkles twinkling up at you from the base of a drystone wall, whitening the gloom, innocent of your memories, and while you’ve nothing against shrubs per se, and you accept that growth’s a natural healthy thing, and though there’s two young women now who wear your daughters’ names and share their Wordle scores with you each morning, yet you feel this tightening of your insides, this tiny wrench towards despair, and you ache to hack the growth back and would offer up your right arm and your old age and the whole damned future for just one sweet magic hour with yesterday’s children on a sloping stretch of lawn that’s open to the sea and to the sky and to the wide fields and to you.