But Ella is the one who saved our family, if it gets saved at all.
She comes every weekend. We garden together. I’m teaching her the roses, their moods and their stubbornness, the way my own grandmother taught me. She asks about George, and I tell her, and in the telling he comes back to me a little, here in this house he never saw but somehow fills.
Last Sunday, kneeling in the dirt beside me, Ella asked if I was happy.
I looked at my yellow kitchen through the window, and my roses coming in strong, and the porch where I take my tea, and my granddaughter with soil on her nose, and I realized the answer was the simplest thing in the world.
“Yes, sweetheart,” I told her. “For the first time in a long time, I’m home.”
I lost a house to grief, and I let grief hand me to people who used me.
