My Neighbor Said My Flowers Didn’t Fit Her Perfect Beige Aesthetic, So She Cut Them Down

The Fence Line

I live on a street where everybody gardens. That’s just what we do here, and it’s what we’ve always done, since long before I inherited my little house from my parents and became one of the older

faces on the block instead of one of the young ones.

Dana, down at number eleven, does roses, dozens of them, in colors that make people slow their

cars in June. The Patels have turned their entire front yard into a vegetable bed so productive that half the street eats their tomatoes by August, whether we ask to or not, because Priya Patel

cannot stand to see good produce go unshared and leaves paper bags of it on porches like a benevolent thief. Marcy grows native things, the wild-looking prairie plants that bring the

butterflies, and old Mr. Kowalski, before he passed, grew gladiolus taller than his grandchildren.

And I have my mother’s flowers.

That’s how I think of them, and that’s how everyone on the street thinks of them, because that’s what they are. My mother’s flowers. She died four years ago this spring, and before she died she

spent forty years turning dirt into color, and the fence line along the side of my yard is the living inheritance she left me, worth more to me than anything in her will.

She grew dahlias, the big dinner-plate kind that look almost too extravagant to be real, in deep reds and sunset oranges and one variety of pale pink that she’d gotten from her own mother

and that I’ve never been able to find in any catalog. She grew phlox that perfumed the whole yard in high summer. She grew coneflowers that the goldfinches loved, and four different kinds of iris,

purple and white and a rusty gold and one nearly black, and she had things timed so that something was always blooming, from the first April crocus straight through to the last October

aster. She planned it that way, deliberately, over decades. She used to say a garden shouldn’t have an off week if you love it enough to pay attention.

When she got sick, that last year, one of the things that grieved her most was the thought of her garden going untended, her plants dying off in the beds she could no longer kneel in. So I did

the only thing I could think of. That autumn, while she was still well enough to sit in a lawn chair and direct me, pointing with her cane and telling me which clumps to lift and how deep to set them, I

dug up her plants and moved them to the fence line of my own yard, where I could care for them, where they wouldn’t be lost when the house was eventually sold.

We did it together, her from the chair and me on my knees in the cold dirt, and it’s one of the last good long afternoons I had with her, the two of us out there in the fading light, her telling stories

about where each plant had come from, this iris from a church sale in 1985, that dahlia from a woman she’d worked with who’d since died, the pink one from her mother, from a garden that

existed now only in this unbroken chain of divided roots passed down through three generations of women who dug in the dirt.

She died the following spring, just as her crocuses came up.

And every spring since, I have divided those plants, the way she taught me, lifting the clumps and

splitting them and replanting, which is how perennials stay vigorous and how a gardener makes more of what she loves. The fence line has only gotten fuller and more beautiful in the four years

since she’s been gone. It is, I am not ashamed to say, the great work of my grief. It is the only thing of my mother’s that is still alive, still growing, still putting up new shoots every April from

roots her own hands touched. When I kneel in that bed I am, in some way I can’t fully explain, still with her.

I’m telling you all of this so that you understand what was at stake. So that when I tell you what my new neighbor did, you’ll understand that it was not, whatever she thought, about some stupid flowers.

In March, Whitney bought the Mitchells’ house, directly across the road from mine.

The Mitchells had lived there thirty years and raised three kids in it and let it get comfortably

shabby the way a long-loved house gets, and when they finally moved south to be near their grandchildren, the house sold fast, and Whitney was the one who bought it. I never learned much

about her. Younger than me, maybe early forties, something in design or marketing, I gathered, one of those careers that happens on a laptop. Single, or at least she lived alone. Sharp,

expensive clothes even when she was just checking her mail. Pleasant enough in a distant, unmemorable way the two or three times I introduced myself.

And she gutted that house.

Two solid months of it. Dumpsters in the driveway, trucks lining the street, the beep of things

backing up starting at seven in the morning. Whole rooms of the Mitchells’ life carried out and thrown away. We all understood, it was her house now, she could do what she liked, and a house

that age can certainly use updating. Nobody said a word about the noise or the mess. That’s how a street works. You extend the grace to the new person that you’d want extended to you.

But when they finally peeled the plastic off and the last truck pulled away and we all got our first real look at what she’d done, the whole street went a little quiet.

The house was beige. Not just the walls. Everything. The siding was beige, and the front door was the same beige, and the trim was the same beige, so that the whole structure read as a single flat

monolithic block of it, with no contrast anywhere, no shutters, no color, nothing. She’d had the front walk redone in beige pavers. The mulch in the two spare beds by the door was some kind

of beige stone. Even the pots on the porch were beige, and empty, or nearly, just a single clipped little evergreen ball in each one, one on either side of the door, perfectly symmetrical, perfectly lifeless.

It looked less like a home than like a rendering of a home, the kind of thing you see in an advertisement where no actual person lives. It looked like the idea of a house drained of

everything that makes a house feel inhabited. Minimalist, I suppose, was the word for it. On our street of roses and tomatoes and butterfly gardens and forty years of my mother’s dahlias, it

landed like a held breath.

But again, nobody said anything. It was her house. Her taste. Her right. If Whitney wanted to live

inside a beige box, that was her business, and the rest of us would go on with our messy colorful gardens and mind our own.

Except I began to notice something.

I noticed the way Whitney looked at my fence line when she walked past it. And she did walk past

it, most days, on the little circuits she took around the block for exercise, and every time she passed my flowers I saw her slow down, just slightly, and I saw her face do something. Not

admiration. The opposite of admiration. A kind of tightening. A displeasure she didn’t bother to hide because she probably didn’t think anyone was watching. She’d look at my mother’s dahlias,

at the whole exuberant riot of that bed, and her face would pinch as though she’d smelled something gone off, and then she’d walk on.

I told myself I was imagining it. And then I told myself that even if I wasn’t, it didn’t matter, because a person is allowed to dislike flowers, and disliking my flowers cost me nothing as long

as they stayed on my side of the road, rooted in my yard, none of her concern.

I tried, in the neighborly way, to warm things up between us. I invited her over twice. The first time, early on, I knocked with a plate of lemon bars and asked if she’d like to come for coffee

sometime, meet a few of the neighbors, and she said she was busy, polite but flat, and didn’t suggest another time. The second time, a few weeks later, I tried again, more directly, would she

like to come to a little thing Marcy was having, just some of the street, nothing fancy. And that time she didn’t even bother with an excuse. She just said, “No, thank you,” and closed the door,

gently, but closed it.

Dana noticed the coolness. So did Marcy. We talked about it, the way neighbors do, not unkindly.

We decided among ourselves that Whitney was private. Or shy, though shy didn’t quite fit. Or maybe just different from us, a city kind of person who’d landed on a street of gardeners and

porch-sitters and didn’t want what we had to offer, didn’t want to belong to the loose warm web of a neighborhood, and that was her right too. You don’t have to be friends with your neighbors.

You just have to get along. And getting along, we figured, was all Whitney wanted, so we gave her that and let the rest go.

That was where it stood, an uneasy but perfectly livable distance, until the Tuesday night in early June when I came downstairs for a glass of water around midnight.

The window over my kitchen sink looks directly out at the fence line. In the daytime you can see the whole bed from there, and I’ve stood at that sink a thousand times watching bees work the

phlox while I wash dishes. At midnight it should have been nothing but darkness.

But there was movement out there. A shape, pale in the moonlight, bent low over my flowers. It took my sleep-fogged brain a few seconds to understand what I was looking at.

It was Whitney. In my garden. With a pair of hedge shears.

And she was cutting down my mother’s flowers.

She was working down the row methodically, one plant at a time, taking each one off about four inches from the ground. Not pulling weeds. Not trimming something overgrown that had crept

onto her property, because nothing of mine was anywhere near her property, the whole bed was on my side of the road, along my fence, entirely within my own yard. She was simply, deliberately,

in the middle of the night, destroying a garden that was none of her business, cutting down forty years of my mother’s work, the dahlias and the phlox and the coneflowers, the iris that had

already bloomed and the ones still to come, the pink dahlia from my grandmother, all of it, snip by snip, calm as anything.

I put my water glass down on the counter. I got as far as the back door with my hand on the handle, my heart pounding, every instinct screaming at me to run out there and stop her.

And then I stopped, my hand on the door, because I looked again and saw that she was already almost done. She’d worked her way nearly to the end of the row. There were maybe three plants

left standing. The rest was already gone, already lying in wilting heaps in the dark. If I ran out there now, screaming, in my nightgown, at midnight, I would not be saving my mother’s flowers. They

were already dead. All I would accomplish was to become a spectacle. Me, hysterical, in my nightgown, in the dark, shrieking at a calm woman who would stand there with her shears and her

composure and then tell the entire street in the morning about the unhinged old lady across the road who’d come at her screaming in the night.

She would have loved that. I understood, standing at that door, that some part of her might even want it. A confrontation on her terms, where she stayed cool and I came apart, where the story

became about my reaction and never about her crime.

I would not give her that. I took my hand off the door handle.

I stood at the window instead, in the dark, and I watched my neighbor finish cutting down my mother’s garden. I watched her take those last three plants. And then I watched her straighten up,

and set down the shears, and survey her work with what I can only describe as satisfaction, a job well done, the offending color finally removed from across the street from her beige house. And

then she picked up her shears and walked back across the road to her own dark lawn and went inside.

I did not sleep that night. Of course I didn’t. I sat at that kitchen table until dawn, and I cried, and I raged, and I grieved, because it was grief, it was exactly grief, the same grief as four years ago

come back around, because she hadn’t just cut down some flowers, she had killed the last living thing my mother made, the green chain that ran back through my grandmother, and she had

done it in the night, with shears, over a color scheme.

And somewhere in those long dark hours, the grief cooled into something else. Something clear and hard and purposeful.

I want to be honest with you about what I felt, because the honesty matters for what comes next. I wanted revenge. I did. I sat at that table and I imagined all the things I could do. I imagined

calling the police, though I knew what that would get me, a report, maybe, a she-said-she-said, no proof, because it had been dark and it was her word against mine. I imagined marching over

there in the daylight and having the screaming match I’d denied myself in the night. I imagined worse things, uglier things, things I’m not proud to have thought.

But as the sky started to gray toward dawn, I found myself thinking, instead, about my mother.

I thought about what my mother would have done. My mother, who was the least vengeful person I ever knew, who used to say that bitterness is a poison you drink hoping the other

person dies. My mother, who had spent forty years making beauty out of dirt, and who would have been heartbroken, yes, devastated, but who would not, I knew, in my bones, have wanted her

daughter to spend her grief on hatred. My mother’s whole life had been an argument that the answer to ugliness is not more ugliness. The answer to ugliness is to make something beautiful.

And I thought about the plants themselves. And here is the thing that Whitney, in her ignorance, in her contempt for a garden she saw as nothing but mess, did not understand. She thought she

had killed my mother’s flowers. But she hadn’t. Because perennials are not annuals. When you cut a dahlia or a phlox or a coneflower off four inches from the ground in June, you do not kill it. The

roots are still there, deep in the soil, full of stored life. You’ve set it back. You’ve stolen this year’s blooms. But the plant itself, the living thing, the root that my mother’s hands and my

grandmother’s hands had touched, that survives. It will come back. It always comes back. That’s the whole miracle of a perennial, the thing my mother loved most about them, that they die back

and return, die back and return, faithful, year after year, long after the person who planted them is gone.

Whitney thought she’d erased my mother. She’d only cut her back for a season.

That knowledge changed everything. It cooled the last of the heat out of me and left behind

something steady and almost peaceful. She could not actually destroy what mattered. The roots were beyond her reach. And knowing that, I found I did not need revenge at all. I needed

something better. I needed to answer her ugliness with exactly the thing my mother would have answered it with.

I spent Wednesday in my garage with the door down.

I didn’t answer when Dana knocked, having noticed, I’m sure, the massacred fence line and worried

about me. I didn’t call anyone. I stayed in my garage all day, and I worked, and I won’t tell you yet exactly what I made, because the whole point is that you find out when Whitney did.

I’ll say only this. My mother had not just left me plants. She’d left me her tools, and her pots, and forty years of accumulated garden things, and she’d left me, most of all, everything she’d taught

me. And I had, saved back in a cool corner of that garage, divisions from that spring. Because that’s what you do every spring, you divide, and you always end up with more than you can plant,

and I’d had a dozen good healthy divisions of my mother’s plants sitting in nursery pots, waiting for me to find homes for them or give them away. The dahlias. The phlox. The coneflowers. And

yes, a division of the pink dahlia from my grandmother, the rarest and most precious of all of them, sitting safe in a pot in my garage the whole time Whitney thought she was cutting the last

of it out of the world.

She hadn’t gotten the divisions. She didn’t even know they existed.

At twenty to six on Thursday morning, before Whitney’s blinds were open, before there was anyone on the street to see me, I carried what I’d made in the garage across the road, and I set

it on her beige lawn, right where she’d see it the second she looked out her kitchen window. And then I went home, and I made a pot of coffee, and I sat down at my own kitchen table by my

own window, and I waited.

What I had made was this.

I had taken the healthiest and most beautiful of my divisions, the pink dahlia most of all, and I had planted them, generously, lovingly, in the best pots I owned, and I had arranged them into a

small, gorgeous, overflowing container garden. A riot of color and life and abundance, the exact opposite of everything Whitney’s beige house stood for. And I had set it on her lawn like a gift.

Because it was a gift. That was the whole thing, the thing that made it work, the thing my mother would have understood completely. It was not a trick. It was not passive aggression dressed up

as kindness. It was a genuine gift, the most genuine gift I had, a division of my mother’s flowers, the same flowers Whitney had just tried to destroy, offered freely to the woman who’d destroyed them.

And tucked into the arrangement was a card, and on the card, in my own hand, I had written:

“Whitney, I saw you in my garden Tuesday night. These are the same flowers. My mother grew

them for forty years, and her mother before her, and you can’t actually kill them, because the roots go too deep, so they’ll be back along my fence next spring the same as always. But I had

these extra divisions, and I thought, rather than be angry, I would give you some of your own. Maybe if you had a little life on your porch you wouldn’t mind mine so much. The pink one is very

rare. It came from my grandmother. Please take good care of it. Your neighbor, Ruth.”

I’ll tell you what I was actually doing, because it was several things at once, and only one of them was kindness.

It was kindness, real kindness, the kind my mother taught me, answering ugliness with beauty, refusing to let Whitney’s cruelty turn me cruel. That was real and I meant it.

But it was also, let’s be honest, the single most devastating thing I could possibly have done to a woman like Whitney, and I knew it when I did it. Because it told her, without a single raised voice,

that I had seen her. That I knew exactly what she’d done, in the night, with her shears. That I had watched the whole thing from my window and chosen not to make the scene she’d been braced

for. It stripped her of every defense at once. She couldn’t deny it, the card said I saw you. She couldn’t claim I’d overreacted, because I hadn’t reacted at all, I’d given her flowers. She couldn’t

tell the street about the crazy old lady across the road, because the crazy old lady across the road had responded to having her garden destroyed by giving the destroyer a beautiful gift and

a rare heirloom plant and a gently worded note. There was no version of the story Whitney could tell that didn’t make her the monster and me the wronged saint. I had, with one container garden,

taken away every weapon she had.

And it told her, too, the thing she most needed to hear and least wanted to. That she had failed.

That she couldn’t win. That the flowers she’d tried to erase were beyond her reach, that the roots went deeper than her shears could go, that they’d be back next spring no matter what she did,

and that the woman she’d tried to hurt was untouchable, serene, already forgiving her from a position of complete moral height. There is nothing, nothing, that so thoroughly defeats a person

who acts out of contempt and control as being met with genuine, unbotherable grace. It gives them nothing to push against. It’s like throwing a punch at water.

So I sat at my window with my coffee, and I waited, and I watched.

Her blinds opened around seven. And a moment later I saw her come to her kitchen window,

coffee in hand, the way people do, and I saw her look out and see the arrangement on her lawn, this explosion of color on her beige grass in front of her beige house. And I watched her go still.

She set down her coffee. She came out her front door in her robe, and she crossed her perfect beige lawn, and she stood over the container garden, and she bent down and read the card. I

watched her read it. I watched her read it a second time.

And I watched Whitney, who had cut down my mother’s garden with such calm, such composure,

such cool contempt, stand frozen over a pot of flowers on her own lawn at seven in the morning and not know what to do. She looked up. She looked across the road at my house, at my kitchen

window, and I did not hide. I lifted my coffee cup to her, a small salute, and I smiled, pleasantly, the way she’d said no thank you and closed the door on me, and I watched the full weight of it land.

She picked up the arrangement, carried it inside, and shut her door.

My phone rang the next morning.

I knew it would be her, eventually, because a woman like Whitney cannot leave a thing unresolved when she’s not the one holding the power. She’d had a day to sit with it, a day to feel the

wrongness of her position with no way to right it, and she couldn’t stand it. So she called.

Her voice was not calm anymore. It was tight and high and furious, and underneath the fury, though she’d have died before admitting it, was something that sounded almost like panic.

“You did all this,” she said, “over some stupid flowers?”

I let that sit for a second. Over some stupid flowers. As though I were the one who’d done something extreme. As though giving a person a gift were an act of aggression, while cutting

down their garden in the night with hedge shears were merely a reasonable response to an aesthetic disagreement.

“Whitney,” I said, and I kept my voice as warm and level as I could. “I didn’t do anything over the flowers. You did. You came into my yard in the middle of the night and cut down my mother’s

garden with a pair of shears because you didn’t like how it looked from your window. I watched you do it. I could have called the police. I could have come out screaming. I could have told the

whole street, all of whom garden, all of whom would have been horrified. Instead I gave you flowers. So I’m not quite sure what it is you’re angry about. It seems to me you got off very, very lightly.”

There was a silence on the line.

“They ruined the whole look of the street,” she said finally, and even she seemed to hear how insane it sounded out loud, this justification, this defense. “That, that mess along your fence. It

ruined the whole aesthetic. I moved here for a certain, I paid a lot for that house, and every time I looked out my window there was this, this chaos across the road, and I asked you, I tried to, I—”

“You never asked me anything,” I said gently. “You said no thank you and closed the door. Twice. You never once said a word to me about the flowers. You just cut them down in the night.”

Another silence.

“Whitney,” I said. “I’m going to tell you something, and I’d like you to actually hear it, because I think you might need to. Those flowers you cut down were my mother’s. She grew them for forty

years. She died four years ago, and those plants are the only living thing I have left of her, and her mother grew some of them before her. The pink dahlia I planted in that pot on your lawn, the rare

one, the one I asked you to take care of, that came from my grandmother’s garden. It’s older than either of us. When you cut those flowers down, you didn’t ruin an aesthetic. You tried to kill

my dead mother’s last living thing over the color of a house. And the only reason I’m not angrier than I am is that you failed. You can’t kill them. The roots are too deep. They’ll be back next

spring, all of them, the whole messy chaotic beautiful lot of them, right along that fence where they’ve always been, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you may as well

make your peace with it now.”

I heard her breathing on the line.

“Why would you give me the pink one,” she said, and her voice had changed, cracked, the fury gone out of it, “if it’s that precious. If it’s your grandmother’s. Why would you give it to me after

what I did.”

And this was the moment, the real one, the whole point of everything.

“Because you have a beige house with nothing living in it,” I said, “and a woman who cuts down her neighbor’s flowers in the middle of the night is a woman who is missing something, Whitney. I

don’t know what happened to you, or what made you into someone who needs everything controlled and colorless and the same, who can’t stand the sight of something wild and alive and

imperfect growing across the street. But I know that’s not a happy way to live. My mother used to say the answer to ugliness is to make something beautiful. So I gave you something beautiful.

Something alive. Something you have to actually take care of, water it, watch it, let it be messy and unpredictable and gorgeous the way living things are. Maybe it’ll do you some good. And if it

doesn’t, if you cut that one down too, well. I’ll still have more, because that’s how these things work. There’s always more, if you know how to divide them. My mother made sure of that.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I don’t know how to take care of it,” she said at last, very quietly, and it was almost a whisper, and it was the truest thing she’d said the whole call, and I understood it was about more than the dahlia.

“I know,” I said. “That’s all right. I do. Bring your coffee over sometime and I’ll teach you. I’ve got a chair on the porch that nobody’s using.”

I didn’t expect her to come. I’ll be honest. I made the offer because it was the right thing to make, the thing my mother would have made, but I hung up that phone fully expecting never to

hear from Whitney again, expecting the pink dahlia to die of neglect on her beige porch, expecting the whole thing to end in a cold permanent distance across the road.

She came on Saturday.

I almost didn’t believe it when I saw her crossing the road with two mugs of coffee, one in each hand, walking slowly and a little stiffly, like a person doing something she wasn’t at all sure of. She

stopped at the bottom of my porch steps and stood there holding the two coffees and not quite meeting my eyes.

“I brought you one,” she said. “I didn’t know how you take it. I made it like I make mine. I can, if it’s wrong, I can—”

“Sit down, Whitney,” I said. “Coffee’s coffee.”

She sat. And we drank our coffee, and for a while neither of us said much, and then, haltingly, she

started to talk. I won’t share all of it, because some of it was hers and told in confidence and isn’t mine to give away. But the shape of it was what you’d expect, which is to say it was sad, the way

these things are almost always sad underneath. A childhood of chaos she’d spent her whole adult life trying to control. A recent loss, a bad one, that she’d handled by gutting a house and painting

the world beige, by trying to make everything around her as smooth and blank and safe as she could, because color and life and mess and growth were exactly the things that had hurt her,

exactly the things she couldn’t control. My fence line, my mother’s wild abundant garden, had been, every single day, a reminder of everything she was trying to wall out. And one night,

sleepless and undone, she’d taken a pair of shears and tried to cut it out of her sight.

It didn’t excuse it. She knew that. She said so, several times, and she apologized, really

apologized, the kind of apology that costs something, sitting on my porch with her hands wrapped around a coffee mug and tears on her beige-house face.

I forgave her. Not because what she did was forgivable, exactly, but because holding onto it would have poisoned me, and because my mother was right about bitterness, and because I

could see, sitting across from her, that Whitney was already carrying a punishment far heavier than anything I could add, which was the burden of being herself, of being a person so frightened of

life that she cut it down in the dark.

The pink dahlia lived. She kept it alive on her porch, checked on it obsessively, called me twice that

first week in a mild panic about a yellowing leaf, and I walked her through it, and it recovered, and it bloomed for her in August, one perfect pale pink dinner-plate bloom, my grandmother’s flower,

opening on Whitney’s beige porch, and she took a photograph of it and texted it to me with more exclamation points than I’d have thought her capable of.

It was the beginning of something. Not a dramatic transformation, nothing so tidy as that. But a beginning. Over that summer and the fall that followed, Whitney and I became, improbably,

friends. She started coming over on Saturdays. I taught her things, how to divide, how to deadhead, how to read what a plant needs from the look of its leaves. She was a quick study,

once she let herself be, once she stopped needing to already know everything and allowed herself to be a beginner at something living.

The next spring, when my mother’s flowers came back along the fence line exactly as I’d promised her they would, up from the roots her shears couldn’t reach, the whole exuberant chaotic

resurrection of them, Whitney stood at my fence and cried, and this time it was a different kind of crying.

And that same spring, she asked me to help her tear out the beige stone from the two empty beds by her front door, and plant something. We put in divisions from my mother’s garden.

Dahlias and phlox and coneflowers, and one more piece of the pink, so that now it grows on both sides of the road, my grandmother’s flower, from a garden that existed once only in

memory, spreading, dividing, coming back.

Her house is still mostly beige. Some things about a person don’t change, and don’t need to. But

now there’s color at the door of it, wild living unpredictable color, and butterflies, and in August the goldfinches come for the coneflower seed, and Whitney sits on her porch in the evenings and

watches them, a woman learning, late and slowly and against everything in her, that you cannot control a living thing into being safe, that the mess is the whole point, that the answer to a beige

and frightened life is to let something grow.

People on the street ask me, sometimes, how it happened. How the woman who cut down my

mother’s garden in the night became the woman who now grows that same garden by her own front door. How I could forgive it, and more than forgive it, turn it into a friendship.

And I tell them the truth, which is that I didn’t do anything clever. I just did what my mother would have done. Somebody handed me ugliness, and I had a choice about what to hand back, and I

chose to hand back beauty, because that was the only response that could actually win. Not because it was the nice thing, though it was. Because it was the only thing that couldn’t be beaten.

You cannot defeat a person who answers cruelty with a gift. You cannot shame a person who was already generous. And you cannot, no matter how sharp your shears, kill a thing whose roots go

deeper than you can reach.

My mother grew those flowers for forty years, and her mother before her, and now they grow on both sides of a road that a lonely, frightened woman once tried to keep beige. They come back

every spring, faithful, unkillable, dividing and multiplying and spreading into every hurt and empty place that will have them.

That’s what a perennial is. That’s what my mother knew, and what she left me, and what I gave, in the end, even to the woman who tried to take it from me.

You cut it down, and it grows back. You divide it, and there’s more. You give it away, and you still have plenty.

Love is like that too, it turns out. My mother knew that as well. She just spoke it in flowers, because that was her language, and now, at last, it’s mine.