In my 20s and 30s, I wanted a man to bring me flowers.
I don’t know exactly when it became a fantasy. Perhaps somewhere in the space between romantic films and the particular longing of a young woman who believed that being loved looked like someone arriving at your door with flowers in hand. I held that image for years.
Then my marriage began to unravel.
I started making flower boquets. Looking back, I think it was a way of staying hopeful , especially on the hard days. If flowers weren’t arriving, I would at least have them near me. It became a habit. Small boquets of whatever was available. A way of saying: beauty is still here, even now.
When I finally left and moved into a rental on my own , newly single, not much money, two children, a life being rebuilt from the ground up – I found a place that was old and sparse in every functional sense. But it had garden space outside. Sad-looking, neglected, waiting.
I didn’t plan what happened next. I just began.
Every day, dance class in the morning. I did not have a job yet.Then some time in the garden. A plant here. A plant there. Second-hand garden furniture from a friend. Slow and steady, the way healing actually works -not in dramatic gestures but in small repeated acts of attention.
Four years later, the garden stood gleaming with flowers and colour. Children played on the lawn. Strangers stopped to ask if they could take a flower or two. Someone once asked if I ran a Montessori, because there were so many toys on the lawn and so many children around. The garden had become a place people were drawn to without quite knowing why.
By the time I left that home, I understood something I hadn’t when I arrived: I had tended the garden, and the garden had tended me. The exchange was complete.
When I moved to my current home “SWASTI” , I started again.
This time from a different place inside – further along in the healing, clearer about who I was becoming. The terrace became the first canvas. Then COVID arrived, and something shifted in the relationship between people and nature everywhere. The garden responded. Flowers came in abundance. People began stopping by for photographs, for shoots, for the simple pleasure of being in a space that was alive and generous.
Rarely a day has passed without fresh flowers somewhere in my home. In one form or another. Without exception.
I look back at the woman in her 20s who was heartbroken over the flowers she didn’t receive, and I want to tell her something.
Not that she was wrong to want them. Not that the longing was foolish.
Just this:
If you knew you could grow a garden of flowers and share them, you would not have been so heartbroken over the flowers you didn’t get.
The flowers were always available. The garden was always possible. The only thing missing was the knowledge that she was someone who could grow things and the years it took to find that out.
She found it out.
The garden is still growing.
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