fresh soil.
A little fertilizer.
Nothing extravagant.
But what the garden cost in love, memory, and time could never be calculated.
Neither could what it gave back to me.
My name is Eleanor Marsh.
Most people in the neighborhood call me Ellie.
Roy started calling me that decades ago, and like many things Roy began, the name outlived him.
I was seventy-one and had lived in that house for twenty-nine years.
I knew nearly everyone on the street.
I knew which families had lived there longer than we had.
I
