Walk With Me in the Garden

The garden wasn’t large, but it felt like another world.

Tucked behind her grandmother’s old stone house, it was a patchwork of roses, jasmine, tulips, and winding vines that seemed to whisper with the wind. As a child, Amara believed it had magic. As an adult, she realized it still did — just a quieter kind.

She hadn’t been back in years. Life had happened — jobs, cities, heartbreak, ambition. The garden waited.

It was her grandmother’s voice on the phone that pulled her back:

“I think it’s time you come home, my love. The roses are asking for you.”

Memories Bloom Softly

The air smelled like earth and sweetness when Amara arrived. Her grandmother, thinner now, but just as warm, stood at the garden gate wearing a faded sunhat and a knowing smile.

They didn’t talk much that first afternoon. They just walked. Amara’s footsteps were hesitant at first, careful not to crush the soil. Her grandmother, however, walked barefoot, humming old Urdu lullabies.

“I used to chase butterflies here,” Amara said suddenly, stopping near the lemon tree.

Her grandmother nodded. “And you cried when one flew away. You thought love meant holding tight.”

Amara smiled, eyes stinging. “Maybe I still do.”

Conversations Between Leaves

Each morning, they walked together in the garden. No phones. No noise. Just stories and silences.

One day, her grandmother handed her a pair of small garden shears. “Help me cut the dead roses.”

“But they still look alive,” Amara protested.

“Only on the surface,” she said gently. “Sometimes, letting go is an act of love.”

They clipped together in silence. The metaphor didn’t need explaining.

Amara began to notice things: how some flowers bent toward each other like they were sharing secrets. How bees danced like time didn’t exist. How healing didn’t always require words.

The Garden Knows

On the third evening, Amara finally spoke what she’d been holding.

“I left because I thought I needed to become someone. But the more I achieved, the more lost I felt.”

Her grandmother took her hand, weathered fingers wrapping around hers.

“You don’t need to become someone,” she said. “You just need to remember who you are.”

Tears came then — not the loud, dramatic kind, but the kind that slip down your cheek when truth touches something old and aching.

Her grandmother didn’t hug her tightly. She just kept holding her hand. Like roots hold the earth.

A Different Kind of Goodbye

On her last morning before returning to the city, Amara asked if they could take one final walk.

“Of course,” her grandmother said. “Walk with me in the garden — like we always do.”

They walked slower this time. Her grandmother stopped to whisper something to a daisy. Amara laughed.

“You talk to flowers?”

“Don’t you?” she replied. “They listen better than most humans.”

Amara bent down, brushed her fingers across the petals. “Thank you,” she whispered.

To the garden.

To her grandmother.

To the version of herself she had found again here.

Some Roots Never Die

Months later, Amara planted a small garden on the balcony of her apartment. It didn’t have roses or lemon trees, but it had jasmine and mint. And every morning, before her day began, she walked barefoot among her potted plants.

Sometimes she’d imagine her grandmother’s voice:

"Walk with me in the garden."

And sometimes, when the city became too loud, she’d close her eyes and return — to the stone house, the sunhat, the hum of lullabies in the wind.

Because some gardens live outside.

But the most sacred ones grow within us.

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