The first thing she moved was the rosemary. It was the most practical one, the one that had the most legitimate reason to be inside, the one she could point to if she needed to explain herself, though she was not explaining herself to anyone because there was no one to explain herself to. Rosemary did not love the cold. Rosemary was better off inside. That was simply true and had nothing to do with anything else.
She set it on the windowsill and went back outside.
The garden was large for a cottage garden, which was because Lisa had never been able to stop at reasonable. Every year she had told herself she was done expanding it and every year she had found a new corner that seemed like it was asking for something, a bare patch of earth that had potential, a trellis that could support one more thing if she was careful about it. The garden had grown the way gardens grew when someone who genuinely loved them was in charge of it - not tidily, not according to a plan, but fully, every inch of it occupied by something that had been chosen and placed and tended.
She looked at it in the grey morning light. Then she went back inside and got the large pots. By midday the cottage was transformed.
She had moved with the focused efficiency of someone who had found a task that required her whole attention and was grateful for it. The larger plants were in the corners, the medium ones along the walls, the smaller ones crowded the windowsills and the table and the shelf above the fireplace and the two chairs she had pushed to the sides to make room. The cottage smelled deeply and completely of green, of soil and leaf and the particular living smell of things that were growing, and Lisa stood in the middle of it and looked at what she had made and felt, for the first time since the funeral, something that was almost like calm.
They needed her.
That was the important thing. They needed water and light and attention and the specific knowledge of what each one required, which was different for all of them, and she knew all of it, every preference and peculiarity, and they could not get any of it from anyone else. She was necessary here. She was useful here. She knew exactly what to do here. She went to the window and checked the rosemary. Then she went outside one more time. The last thing she brought in was the veronica.
She had planted it three days after the funeral, in the small bed at the garden's eastern edge where the morning light came first. She had chosen the spot deliberately. She had chosen everything about it deliberately - the soil, the depth, the distance from the other plants, the direction it faced. She had planted it with the careful attention of someone making something that mattered, which was what it was. She had not named it. She did not need to name it. She knew what it was.
It was small still, the way recently planted things were small, more potential than presence, its thin stems and narrow leaves not yet showing the vivid blue it would eventually become. She lifted it, pot and all, with both hands, the way you carried something fragile, and brought it inside.
She put it in the best spot.
The windowsill above the kitchen table caught the light from two directions in the morning, east and then south as the sun moved, and it held the warmth longer than anywhere else in the cottage. She had been keeping the rosemary there but she moved the rosemary without hesitation and put the veronica in its place and stood back and looked at it.
Small. Pale. Not yet what it would be.
She put her hand near the soil without touching it, the way she checked all her plants, feeling for moisture and temperature, for the specific quality of the earth that told her what it needed. Her power moved through her hands when she did this, quiet and habitual, the language she had always spoken most naturally. The veronica was fine. It was newly planted and slightly shocked from the move but it was fine, it was alive, and she would make sure it stayed that way.
LSA: There.
She said it to no one. To the plant. To the cottage and its crowded green-smelling air.
LSA: You're inside now. You're safe.
Outside the garden was empty for the first time in as long as she could remember, the beds bare, the trellises unoccupied, the earth turned where she had lifted things out of it. It looked strange. It looked like something that had been evacuated. She did not look at it for long.
She turned back to the cottage, to the green crowded living warmth of it, to the rosemary and the ferns and the climbing things she had draped over the furniture and the small vivid things on every surface, to all of it needing her and her knowing exactly what to give, and she closed the door on the empty garden and did not open it again that day. The veronica sat in the best spot by the window. The morning light would find it first thing tomorrow. That was enough. That was what mattered. That was the whole of what she needed it to be.