The Garden of Everything That Matters

Martha stood on her back porch at dawn, the same porch she'd stood on for forty-seven years, watching the papaya tree sway in the morning breeze. Her grandson had helped her plant it last spring—his small hands patting the soil around the base while she told him how his grandfather used to bring her papaya for breakfast when they were courting. The fruit wasn't ready yet, but its broad leaves stretched toward the light like open hands.

She adjusted her father's old straw hat on her head, the one he'd worn working his fields. It had belonged to him before her, and now it sheltered her white hair from the Florida sun. Some mornings she felt ridiculous wearing it—a seventy-eight-year-old woman in a man's hat—but then she'd remember how her father's hands had looked when he'd taken it off to wipe his brow, and the ridiculousness didn't matter anymore.

A red fox emerged from the bushes near the property line, the same one that had been visiting for three years now. Martha called him Frederick, though she had no idea if he was actually the same fox or just one who looked like all the others. He moved with that careful, deliberate grace that comes from knowing exactly where you belong. She watched him pause, nose testing the air, before disappearing beneath the palm tree that had guarded the corner of her yard since before she'd moved here.

"I'm a zombie this morning, Grandma," her granddaughter had announced yesterday after finals week, shuffling into the kitchen with exaggerated limp arms. Martha had laughed, then made coffee and told her about the summer of 1968 when she'd worked double shifts at the hospital and sometimes felt like the walking dead herself. "But you know what?" she'd said, "Even zombies eventually find their way to breakfast."

She rested her hands on the porch railing, thinking about all the lives she'd lived within this single life—the young nurse, the new wife, the mother, the widow, the grandmother. The papaya tree would outlive her, she knew. The fox would forget her eventually. But the hat would go to her grandson, and the stories would go to both of them, and somewhere in the space between what stays and what fades away, she supposed that's where love makes its home.