The Winter Garden

Mrs. Nakamura's garden shouldn't have been blooming. It was January in Vermont, and yet there were roses—red and impossible—climbing the trellis by her back door.

Ben, the boy who delivered her groceries, had asked about them once. She had simply smiled and said, "Some things grow when they're spoken to kindly."

He didn't understand what she meant until the day she asked him to stay for tea.

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She told him about her husband, a botanist who had died thirty years ago. About the seeds he had brought back from Kyoto. About the conversations she still had with him every morning, standing among the flowers he had loved.

"Love doesn't die when people do," she said, pouring more tea. "It just changes form. Like water. Like light."

Ben looked at the roses, impossible and blooming, and began to understand.