In the spring, Edna planted sweet peas. She bought the seeds at the garden centre on a Thursday morning, came home, and strung the rope between two old posts at the back of the garden, the ones that had held up a washing line years ago and now held up nothing. She tied it carefully, the way she imagined a sailor might. Lily drove up from the city for the weekend and they planted the seeds together, pressed into dark soil under a pale blue sky.
By July, the sweet peas had climbed nearly to the top. Pink, white, purple, deep red. They moved a little in the evening wind, and in the mornings Edna stood at the kitchen window with her tea and looked at them. She thought about her father, who had never stood in a garden. She thought about her mother, who had stood in this very garden for forty years and never once let herself plant them. She thought about the things we carry in silence, and the things we pass down without meaning to, and the long, slow way that love sometimes travels — through attics and envelopes and old rope — to find the person it was always meant for.
She was eighty-three years old. She had not really known much of her father until November. She stood at the window in the morning light, and she was, in ways she could not quite explain, at peace.
