“Look at that.

Turns out the new girl was worth keeping.” And I understood that the garden had not only given me a life.

It had quietly handed my old one back to me, reshaped, as a gift I could give.

There is a cruelty in the way we retire people, I have come to think.

We take a person at the summit of what they know — thirty, forty years of hard-won skill, the deep competence that only time can build — and we walk them to a door and thank them and send them off to play golf, as though all that knowledge were a uniform to be returned at the gate.

And the person goes home and the knowledge sits inside them with nowhere to go, curdling into the ache I’d felt at my empty table, the ache of being full of something no one needs.