Garden Work

By Peter Bowden

The rain came soft at first, tapping on the leaves like a man knocking gently at a door. I was in the garden, sleeves rolled, hands black with earth. The snapdragons stood in neat rows, their colors dulled by the gray of the sky but proud all the same. Pansies huddled low to the soil, their faces open like little children watching the clouds. The boxwood hedges were dark and still. I liked the quiet of the rain. It was clean. I worked with slow care. Pulling weeds, turning soil, checking the roots for rot. The kind of work you feel in your shoulders. There was a peace in it. The kind that does not come easy. The kind you earn. The garden took the rain without complaint. I watched it soak in, running along in little rivers, making everything soft and alive again. The cold wet seeped through my shirt. I let it. The pansies drooped under the weight of water, but they would rise again. Snapdragons held firm. Tough little bastards. The hedges needed trimming, but not today. Today was for rain and mud and the good ache in your hands from honest work. I stayed until the rain turned hard. Then I stood a while longer, just watching, breathing. The garden would remember.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things Are Quiet

By Peter Bowden
Image
The house was quiet now. The mornings came and went like old friends who had grown tired of the visit. He would sit at the kitchen table with his hands around a coffee cup that had long gone cold, staring at the empty chair across from him. The ache was not loud, nor did it rage. It sat in his chest like a stone sunk to the riverbed, unmoved by the current of passing days. He thought about the way she would hum softly while drying the dishes, the sound slipping through the cracks of his memory like sunlight through a dusty window. He missed her without ceremony, without grand displays. It was a dull, persistent throb that never asked for attention but never left him alone. Sometimes he would walk the old path down to the river, where they once threw crumbs to the ducks and talked about small things that seemed bigger then. The air was thick with the scent of pine, and he could hear the water moving over the rocks, just as it always had. It made him angry sometimes—how the world did not...
Read more

She Was Always Sad

By Peter Bowden
Image
She was always sad, though most people never noticed. She laughed at the right times, nodded when spoken to, and never once caused a scene. But there was a heaviness behind her eyes, like clouds that never moved, just hovered quietly. At the coffee shop, she always took the seat by the window, looking out as if waiting for someone who never came. The truth was, she had once loved with the kind of fullness that makes you believe you’ll never be alone again. A hand in hers, a voice calling her name from across a quiet room, the warmth of another body curled beside her in the coldest months. And then one day, the world cracked open, and he was gone. Just like that. No storm. No explosion. Just silence where there had once been everything. So she carried that silence. Not with drama or despair, but with the quiet dignity of someone who had known something precious and lost it. Her sadness wasn’t bitterness—it was love, still alive, with nowhere to go. And so she let it live inside her, s...
Read more

One More Trip Around the Sun -- 70 Years, 840 months 3,652 weeks 25,567 days 36,817,200 minutes 2,209,032,000 seconds

By Peter Bowden
Image
He woke to the smell of dust motes dancing in sunbeams, a golden, forgotten incense that had perfumed every birthday morning since memory began. The air was a tapestry woven from the scent of old paper and the distant, murmuring sigh of wind through ancient trees. Outside, the world hummed with an invisible, electric current, a quiet symphony of cicadas in the noon-warm grass and the faint, sweet decay of summer.  Another year had passed, not loudly, but like a bird moving through high branches—seen only if you were looking. He didn’t count years much anymore. They gathered on their own, stacking like stones in the garden wall.  It wasn't a number so much as a whisper on the wind, a faint echo from a time when the world was a carousel of blazing, untamed colors, now softened, like a watercolor left too long in the sun. His fingers traced the cool glass of the window seeing not merely the garden beyond, but all the springs and autumns that had blossomed and withered there. Each...
Read more