“What you do with that time is your responsibility.”
He nodded. Eventually, he stood. “Next spring?” “Saturday morning.”
He smiled slightly.
“I’ll be here.”
“Bring gloves.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Then he left.
I remained at the kitchen table after the door closed.
Outside, the garden had already entered its winter state.
The flowers were gone.
The soil was dark and still.
Waiting.
Roy planted that garden in the summer of 1997.
He spent an entire Saturday making sure everything was exactly where he wanted it.
He chose red and yellow because those were the colors he had brought me on every anniversary.
He never asked whether I wanted a garden.
He simply knew.
I maintained it for twenty-nine years.
And I intended to keep maintaining it for however many years I had left.
The following spring, a twenty-two-year-old young man would kneel beside me in borrowed gardening gloves.
Together, we would place red and yellow flowers into the pattern Roy had created decades earlier.
Kyle would not understand everything the garden meant.
Not completely.
Perhaps nobody besides me ever could.
But he would understand more than he had before.
And perhaps that was enough.
Understanding rarely arrives all at once.
We gather pieces of it over the years.
We plant things.
We care for them.
We watch them grow.
Sometimes they are damaged.
Sometimes we have to begin again.
And eventually, if we pay attention, their meaning becomes clearer.
Roy had understood that long before I did.
Maybe that was why he planted the garden in the first place.
The garden Kyle said would grow back.
The garden that did grow back.
The garden that, in every way that mattered, had never really left.
