She started with the fern. It felt right to start with the fern. It had been the first to show her something was wrong and it would be the first to go back, that was a kind of order she could hold onto, a logic that asked nothing complicated of her and simply required that she pick it up and carry it outside.
She picked it up and carried it outside. The garden received her without ceremony. She had expected it to feel strange, stepping back into it after a month, and it did feel strange, but not in the way she had anticipated. Not hostile or accusatory. Just different in the way a place felt different when you had been away from it long enough for it to become slightly unfamiliar, the way you had to relearn the particular unevenness of the path, the way the light fell differently than you remembered.
She set the fern down in its old spot. The earth there still held the impression of the pot from before, a faint circular mark in the soil, and the fern settled into it the way things settled into places they had been before, with a kind of recognition that did not require words.
She went back inside.
She carried them out one by one, which took most of the morning. She did not rush. She moved through it the way she moved through her morning rounds, with attention and without hurry, giving each one the particular care of being carried properly, roots supported, stems not bent against the door frame. The climbing thing was awkward on the stairs and she took it slowly. The larger pots she moved with both arms and the particular technique she had developed over years of moving things that were heavy and fragile at once.
The cottage emptied gradually.
By midday it smelled like a cottage again rather than a greenhouse and the surfaces were visible and the chairs were back where they belonged and the windowsills held only the things that had always lived on windowsills, the small practical things of a life, and Lisa stood in the middle of it and looked at the space and felt the absence of the green crowded weight of it and breathed.
She breathed for a while. Then she went back outside.
She did not put everything back exactly where it had been. That had been the old arrangement, the one that had grown up over years of adding things without a plan, and she walked through it now with different eyes, the eyes of someone who understood what she had been doing and was choosing to do something else. She moved things apart from each other. She gave each one more space than it had had before, more room between the pots, more air around the leaves.
Room to be something other than what she poured into them.
She repotted three of the worst affected ones in fresh soil, taking her time with the roots, checking them carefully, her power moving through her hands and into the earth the way it always did. But she paid attention now to what was moving with it. She felt for the grief the way you felt for a splinter, knowing it was there, locating it without flinching, and she did not try to stop it from being there.
She just felt it. Let it be what it was. Her grief, in her hands, in the soil, in everything she touched.
And then she kept working anyway, tending each plant with the particular care she had always given them, and the grief was there and the tending was there and both things were true at once and neither one cancelled the other out.
She reached the veronica last.
She carried it outside carefully, the way she had carried it in, and she stood for a moment looking at the east facing bed where she had first planted it, the morning bed, where the light came first. The soil there was still good. She had turned it before bringing the veronica inside and it had been sitting empty and it had continued to be good soil the way good soil continued when left alone.
She knelt down and took the veronica out of its pot.
The roots were thin. Thinner than she would have liked. But alive, reaching in the particular tentative way of roots that had been uncertain for a while and were not yet sure if certainty was available again. She held them in her hands and felt her power move through them and felt the grief move with it and did not pull the grief back.
She put the veronica in the ground.
She pressed the soil around it with both palms, the way she had when she first planted it, the way she had warmed it before asking it to hold something important. She pressed her hands flat and felt everything that was moving through them go into the earth, the power and the grief together, not separate, not one without the other.
She sat back and looked at it.
Small. Pale. Still thin. But in the ground now, in real soil, with real light coming from the east and real air moving around it and real space between it and the next thing and room, for the first time in a month, to be just what it was.
LSA: There.
She said it quietly.
LSA: Better.
She did not know yet if it was better. She would not know for a while. That was the nature of growing things, that the results of what you did for them arrived in their own time and not yours, and the only thing you could do was give them what they needed and wait and trust the process you had always trusted. She stayed in the garden until the light began to change.
She did not go back inside until the evening, and when she did the cottage felt different than it had in a month, lighter and more itself, and she sat in her chair by the fireplace and looked at the empty windowsill above the kitchen table where the veronica had been and felt the quiet of the place settle around her.
Outside in the east facing bed the veronica stood in its ground with the last of the day's light on it. Small. Pale. Present. It was enough to start.