A Letter I Never Sent You About the Garden

Dear Mom,

I'm standing in your garden right now, the one you spent thirty years building and I spent thirty years mostly ignoring, and I owe you an apology I should have written a long time ago.

You always asked if I wanted to learn the names of things. The peonies, the ones that take three years to bloom and then bloom for decades. The tomatoes you started from seed every February on the kitchen windowsill, weeks before anyone else's were even in the ground. I always said maybe later, and I meant it every time, and later never came until now, standing here without you, trying to remember which bed was the one you were proudest of.

I think it was the one by the fence. You told me once it took you four failed summers to get it right, and you never mentioned it again after that, because by then it just worked, and things that work don't need explaining, you always said. I wish you'd explained anyway. I wish I'd asked.

I found your garden journal in the shed last week. Thirty years of it, one notebook per year, dates and weather and what you planted where and what died and why. You wrote things like "too much rain in May, lost the beans" and "moved the roses again, third time, hopefully the last." You were keeping records nobody asked you to keep, for a reason I understand now that I didn't understand then: you were leaving instructions. Not for a stranger who might buy this house someday. For me. You just never said so, because you were waiting for me to ask.

I'm asking now. Too late to hear the answer in your voice, but not too late to try.

I planted something in the fence bed this weekend. I don't know if I did it right. I used your journal as a guide, and I could hear you correcting me the whole time — not too deep, more space between them, you'll thank me next spring. I hope you're right. I hope something comes up.

I'm going to keep your journal going. Same notebook, next page, my handwriting instead of yours. Maybe my daughter will find it in thirty years and wish she'd asked me sooner too. If she does, I hope she at least gets to read what I wrote down, which is more than I get from you now — just this garden, saying what you never got to say out loud.

With more love than I ever told you while you were here to hear it,

Your daughter