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Guest Essay

By Brian Keith Jackson

Mr. Keith Jackson is a novelist and essayist.

I often start and end my day in my mother’s garden. She died almost three years ago, of stomach cancer. The garden was sacred to her. While she was alive, I saw it as just a place to read on a lounge chair or duck out to for a smoke when I came back home to visit. Since her death, I’ve found myself drawn there. I feel closer to her when I am in the garden. I cannot claim to know the names of all the plants, shrubs and bushes, but I do my best to take care of them. It feels like taking care of her, as I had tried to do, right up to her last breath.

Last spring, I came to know one of the birds.........

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