Through four seasons, a gardener learns the shape of time.
Tomas had kept the same garden for thirty years, and it had taught him almost everything he believed about time. A garden, he had learned, did not reward impatience. You could not hurry a seed, could not argue a rose into bloom before its season. It moved at its own deliberate pace, indifferent to the wishes of the man who tended it, and this indifference had, over the decades, become a kind of teacher to him.
In spring, the work was all hope: the turning of the soil, the burying of seeds that looked like nothing and promised everything. Tomas had never lost his wonder at the audacity of a seed, that so much life could be folded into so small and unpromising a thing. He planted in faith, as one must, knowing that some of what he sowed would fail, and unable to know in advance which.
Summer was abundance, and with abundance came a new anxiety. Everything grew at once, the flowers and the weeds together, and the gardener's task became one of judgment: what to nurture and what to pull, what to let flourish and what to sacrifice for the good of the whole. He had come, reluctantly, to accept that a garden was not only an act of creation but also, inescapably, an act of choosing what would die.
Autumn was the season he loved most and trusted least, for its beauty was the beauty of an ending dressed up as a festival. The leaves turned gold and scarlet precisely because they were dying, and Tomas could never quite decide whether this made their splendour more poignant or merely more honest. Perhaps, he thought, the two were the same.
Winter stripped the garden to its bones, and it was in winter that Tomas felt closest to understanding it. The bare branches did not pretend. They stood against the grey sky and waited, and their patience was neither hope nor despair but something older and calmer than either. He was an old man now, closer to his own winter than his spring, and he found that the prospect no longer frightened him as it once had.
He had spent his life learning the garden's single, patient lesson, and he thought he had finally grasped it. Everything that lives must be surrendered in its turn; and the surrender, undertaken willingly, was not the opposite of love but its final and most difficult form.