He wasn’t a garden person.
He’d said so, clearly, at the beginning: *I can keep a cactus alive. That’s my upper limit.* He was someone who lived in his head, who found the pace of growing things disorienting, who could not tell a weed from a herb.
And yet.
Sylvie looked up from where she was kneeling in the dirt to find him standing over her, frowning at a plant with the focused expression he usually reserved for complicated problems.
“Is this the one you said was dying last week?”
“The rosemary? Yes.”
“It looks better.”
“I moved it.” She sat back on her heels. “It needed more sun.”
He nodded, processing this like new information. Then he crouched beside her, heedless of the mud, and looked at the plant at her eye level.
“What else does it need?”
She looked at him. “Are you gardening right now?”
“I’m asking.”
He wasn’t romantic about it. He didn’t claim to love the garden. But he asked questions — good questions, genuine ones — and remembered the answers, and occasionally appeared at her side with the right tool when she needed it, not because he’d been asked.
Attention, she thought, is an underrated love language. Not grand gestures or expensive gifts. Just: I noticed what matters to you, and so it matters to me now too.
She showed him how to check the soil.
His hands were completely wrong for it — he had a surgeon’s precision in everything else — but he was trying, and she loved him for trying in a way that made her chest feel a size too small.
“You’re going to like this,” she told him.
“I already do,” he said, and he wasn’t looking at the plant.
✦ Today’s Reflection
What is something your partner loves that you’ve made an effort to understand or participate in — and how did it change you?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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