Of His Own Accord

The next morning, the sun found him not at the edge of the garden, but walking through its open gate. There was no hesitation in his step, no trace of the uncertainty that had held him at its perimeter just days before. He carried the trowel he had been given, its wooden handle now familiar in his grip.

He walked past the woman, who was already tending her row, and offered her a small, quick nod of his own, a silent greeting she returned in kind. He continued on to the small patch of earth that was becoming his, the soil still dark and damp from the previous day’s work.

He knelt and began to turn the earth, the rhythm coming more easily this time, the work less a task now and more a kind of conversation. He had not been summoned. No one had asked him to return. He had simply woken with the sun and known that this was where he needed to be. In this quiet, unbidden return, in the simple act of picking up the work where he had left off, he answered a question no one had asked aloud: he was no longer a stranger looking in, but a gardener, present and accounted for, of his own accord.