Garden

I drove past my grandmother's house yesterday.

The garden is overgrown.

Tomato plants climbing everything,

vines covering the fence,

the whole thing gone to seed.

She died two years ago.

No one has been watering.

No one has been pruning.

The garden has been doing

what gardens do

when nobody's paying attention—

growing wild.

I remember her hands in that soil.

How she'd complain about the weeds

while pulling them anyway,

replanting the tomatoes every spring,

building the fence higher

because the vines kept escaping.

Now the vines have won.

They're everywhere.

Covering everything.

The garden is finally

the way it always wanted to be—

wild, untended, free.

But that's not what she wanted.

She wanted it neat.

She wanted the tomatoes in rows.

She wanted to control

the thing she grew.

And now it's grown past

all her control,

and she's not here

to see it.

I didn't stop the car.

Just drove past,

saw the wildness,

and kept going.