Memory Is a Garden

The old house still stands on the edge of the field, where the horizon softens and the trees lean like tired watchers. No one lives there now, except memory. And me, sometimes.

I come back in spring.

The air smells of soil and lilac. The shutters creak in the wind like old bones, and the steps sigh beneath my weight. This was once my grandmother’s place, then my mother’s for a short while. Then, time took over.

Inside, it’s quiet in the way cathedrals are quiet—full of what once was.

The floorboards know my walk. The kitchen window still filters light like it remembers her hands—always busy, always kind.

Here, I learned how to shell peas, how to braid long grasses into crowns, how to pray without words. She had a way of looking at you like you mattered more than anything, even the weather.

Her garden still grows in pieces. Wild now. Lavender and mint cling stubbornly to the edge of the stone path. The roses are faded, but defiant.

I kneel.

Dig fingers into earth, and I remember.

I remember a story she told about her own mother, how she once waited for a letter from a war that never came. And still she folded laundry, baked bread, watered petunias.

“She never let grief steal the small things,” she said. “That’s how we survive.”

Grief visits this place like an old friend. But so does joy. They live here together, braided into the same root.

A blue jay flashes past, and I look up.

Sometimes I think memory is a garden. You don’t tend it every day, but you return. You kneel. You remember. You love.

That’s what I do now.

I pull a few weeds. I plant marigolds.

I go home quietly, dust on my knees, sun in my chest.

And I whisper, “Thank you.”