Three weeks is enough time to change a life if you spend it correctly, and I spent it correctly.
First, I finished the garden.
That may sound strange. It may sound like the wrong priority. But I had one season left before the frost, and there was a section of the property I had planned out two years earlier and never installed, a slope on the west side that got full sun and drained beautifully, and I had always known exactly what belonged there. So I rented a truck and I drove to the nursery and I bought nine birch trees and forty pounds of bulbs, and I spent two weekends with a shovel and a level and a pair of gloves that fell apart at the thumbs, and I planted the slope.
I did it without asking permission. The house was his, but the garden was mine, in the way that a thing you have de
