My husband created the garden during the summer of 1997. He never asked whether I wanted one.

One Saturday morning, Roy simply pulled into the driveway with the back of his truck loaded with fresh soil, trays of red and yellow flowers, gardening tools, and—judging by the certainty with which he moved—a plan he had clearly been thinking about for quite some time.

I stood on the porch and watched him.

Roy was fifty-three that summer.

He still looked very much like the man I had married when I was twenty-six, although age had changed the way he moved. There was less wasted motion now. Every step seemed deliberate, as though he had learned exactly how much energy each task required and refused to spend more than necessary.

He worked almost the entire day.

By six that evening, he finally climbed the porch steps and stood beside me.

Together, we looked at what he had created.

The garden appeared almost effortless from the street.

Red and yellow flowers curved naturally through one another, but from where I stood slightly above them, I could tell the pattern was carefully planned.

When the late afternoon sunlight touched the petals, the entire flower bed seemed to glow.

“Roy,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Do you like it?”

“Why red and yellow?”

He smiled.

“Because those are the flowers I always bring you.”

He said it as though the answer should have been obvious.

That was Roy.

He had a way of explaining obvious things with a quiet smile that suggested he found it amusing that I needed them explained at all.

It was the same smile I had noticed the first time we met at a church social in 1968.

Every anniversary, Roy brought me red and yellow flowers.

Every single year.

For forty-one years.

I looked at the garden again.

“This might be the most beautiful thing anyone has ever made for me.”

Roy shrugged.

“It’s just a garden.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

And despite what he said, I knew he understood.

Roy died in March of 2011.

He was sixty-seven.

That still feels far too young.

Of course, I suppose any age would have felt too young to me.

If he had been seventy-five, I would have wanted eighty.

If he had been eighty, I would have wanted ninety.

There would never have been an age when losing him would have felt reasonable.

He was still completely Roy when he died.

Still making Saturday plans.

Still noticing things that needed fixing.

Still wearing that slow-arriving smile.

He had a heart attack while working in the garden.

Saturday morning.

Exactly where he had spent so many Saturday mornings before.

The doctors told me it happened quickly.

I decided a long time ago that I would believe them.

After Roy died, I kept the garden exactly as he had designed it.

Or at least as exactly as anyone can keep a garden.

Gardens change.

Flowers die.

Winters come.

Soil needs replacing.

Plants have to be moved or replanted.

But every spring, I restored the same pattern.

Red flowers.

Yellow flowers.

The same sweeping curve Roy had created in 1997.

Every year, I spent one afternoon kneeling in the dirt, planting everything in the places I remembered.

And every year, when I finally stood, wiped the soil from my jeans, and looked down at the finished garden, I felt Roy nearby.

Not literally.

I knew better than that.

But there are certain things you do long enough with someone you love that, after they’re gone, performing those same rituals seems to bring some part of them back into the room.

Or the yard.

The garden wasn’t valuable in a financial sense.

The flowers cost perhaps forty or fifty dollars every spring.

Some fresh soil.

A little fertilizer.

Nothing extravagant.

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