I don't know if this even counts as a confession, really. It’s more of a… a lingering ache, maybe. I was walking past one of those community gardens today, the kind with the raised beds and the handmade signs naming all the herbs. And it just sort of… stopped me. Not literally, of course, my old knees wouldn't like that, but my mind just kind of got stuck there. I think maybe, at some point, I made a very fundamental miscalculation. A kind of, I don't know, a cognitive error, I guess. My family, you see, we had an organic farm. Long before it was fashionable, before people were even really talking about "organic" in the mainstream. We just… grew things the right way, the way nature intended. There was a rhythm to it, a beauty in the dirt under your fingernails, the smell of damp earth after a rain. And I left it. I left it for… well, for "corporate management." A title that always felt a bit sterile, a bit… clinical, for something that was supposed to be a career. I told myself it was about financial stability, about not wanting to be misunderstood, you know, the "artistic type" who couldn’t handle the practicalities of life. I was always sketching, drawing, trying to capture the light on the leaves, the texture of a beet root. I convinced myself I needed to prove something, that my art could wait, that I needed to be "sensible." And now… now I'm 76, and I saw those sunflowers in that little garden, straining towards the sun, and it was just a flash of a memory, of walking through fields of them, taller than me, their faces so BRIGHT. And I thought, did I really make the right choice? Was it really a choice, or was it a kind of escape from something I thought was too simple, too… un-ambitious? I don’t know if I ever really loved that corporate life. I was good at it, yes, efficient, organized, but there was never that… that deep, visceral connection. It feels like I traded something irreplaceable for something… well, for something that just kind of faded away, like a photograph left in the sun. And now, I just have this quiet, gentle sadness when I see dirt, I guess.