That is not entirely precise. Gardens are not static things. They require maintenance and seasonal change and replacement when things don’t survive the winter. What I mean is that I kept the character of it, the red and yellow flowers in the pattern he had planted them, the same curve of color that caught the afternoon light the same way.
Every spring I planted new flowers.
Every spring I spent an afternoon in the front yard on my knees in the dirt, planting red and yellow flowers in the pattern my husband had established, and when I stood up and brushed the dirt from my jeans and looked at what I had done, I felt him nearby in the particular way you feel the people you have loved when you are doing something that connects you to them.
The garden was not expensive.
Annual flowers are not expensive. The soil amendment I added each spring was not expensive. The garden cost me, in materials, perhaps forty or fifty dollars a year.What it cost me in other ways was not calculable.
What it gave me in return was not calculable either.
I am seventy-one years old. I have lived in this house for twenty-nine years. My name is Eleanor Marsh, though most of the neighborhood calls me Ellie, which Roy started and which stuck because most things Roy started stuck around long after him.
I know every house on this street. I know which families have been here since before I arrived and which ones are new, and I know the specific rhythms of the block, the morning walkers and the dogs they walk and the children whose heights I have tracked across two decades of autumns and springs.
I knew the Hauser family.
Dennis Hauser had lived three houses down for twelve years. He was a man who had made money in the way of men who make money in mid-sized cities, through commercial real estate and a restaurant supply business and various other interests that I did not fully understand but that produced the visible evidence of considerable success. He drove a large silver sedan and wore the specific casual confidence of someone who has been comfortable long enough that comfort has become ambient.He was not a bad neighbor.
