Through winters that killed the roses and springs when she replanted them.

Through decades when every rational person in her life must have believed she was clinging to a delusion.

She had watered a rooftop garden ten thousand mornings on the strength of nothing but a refusal to give up on a child the whole world told her was dead.

I stood in it and I thought: this is what it looks like to be loved by someone who does not quit.

I had never seen it before.

I had not known, until I stood among her stubborn roses, that such a love existed anywhere in the world, let alone that it had been pointed, the entire time, at me.