Today I worked in the garden. It was hot, the kind of heat that makes the air hum and the soil smell alive. The beds needed mulching, new planting, and trimming. Work that doesn’t wait.
I haven’t been out in the garden as much as I want to since his surgery. Things have been too challenging, and leaving him by himself feels too risky. So even this small return to the soil felt like a homecoming, a piece of myself I had missed.
I asked him to stay inside, safe from the sun and the risk of falling. I explained it carefully and patiently, why it mattered, why I just needed a few moments to finish things. But explanations do not land the same way now. Words are harder for him to process, and the meaning slips away before it can settle. When I grow tired and he sees my frustration, he hears only rejection. He says quietly that he will go home, not understanding that he is already home. It is our familiar cycle, me trying to reason, him trying to belong, both of us a little heartbroken in between.
Still, I kept working. I finished what I could, took photos of the garden, the light, the new blooms, small proof of life still unfolding.
Then he came out to sit beside me on the deck, brushing his hand through the grass. He tried to lower himself to the ground, lost his balance, and rolled gently onto the deck like a small ball. For a moment I froze, then seeing he was not hurt, I laughed.
It burst out of me, that laugh, pure and real, almost like before.
I apologised right away, but he smiled and said it was all right. He laughed too.
It felt like a rare gift, laughter meeting where words could not. Because more and more, the words do not come. He searches for them, and I see the effort in his face, the pauses growing longer, the gap between thought and speech widening like a quiet river.
But sometimes it does not need words. Sometimes it is enough to sit side by side, to share a laugh, to touch the same patch of grass and just be.
Today, for a brief moment, we were simply two people still finding each other in the spaces between words.
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