Status Updates From The Gardener's Wife's Mistress

“The world was closing in on itself, pulling all its color and moisture deep into its belly in preparation for the coming winter. Hayden couldn’t see that now, but he could hear it in the quiet inhalations and exhalations of brittle leaves and drying stalks and the whispering sheaves of decorative grasses. What looked like death was only a refusal to surrender. Adaptation, metamorphosis. Transfiguration.” 😍

Grief is a strong emotion. . . author’s poetic style meets it directly.

“His rose was gone. What purpose had the dew after the petals fell? Hayden wished the sun could sear him into oblivion, too.”

garden therapy

“There was something reassuring in the rhythms of the body following the course of the sun. Hayden’s eyes adjusted effortlessly to the growing light as he worked, cutting down the exhausted summer growth of the perennial flowers, raking away the debris, heaping a deep bed of insulating mulch to grant the sleeping bulbs beneath the earth refuge from the coming incursions of winter.”

Gorgeous writing . . .

“Grief was a wild rhododendron forest. Tangled, impassable, choking all light from any other sprout attempting to grow. An uninvited, foreign invader claiming every inch of ground as its own.”