I’m not entirely sure if this even counts as a confession, per se, more of an observation, I suppose. Or maybe a retrospective diagnostic assessment of my own vocational dis-ease, if we’re being precise. I’m 79 now, I think. Hard to keep track sometimes when the days just sort of… blend. My wife, bless her, used to say I had the memory of an elephant, but even elephants forget where they buried the good nuts after a few decades. Anyway. I’m sitting out here in my garden, as I often do these days, watching the evening light hit the viburnum just so, and it occurred to me, with a rather sharp, almost physical pang, that this is what I should have done with my life. Not… *that*. That, of course, being corporate tax accounting. Oh, the glamour. The spreadsheets! The endless columns of numbers that never quite added up the way they were supposed to, until you found the one misplaced decimal point that had thrown off a multi-million-dollar acquisition. Riveting stuff, truly. My father, a good man, pragmatic to a fault, always said, “Son, you need a stable profession. Something with a pension.” And my mother, bless her artistic soul, never contradicted him directly but would sometimes just… sigh. A very particular kind of sigh. A sigh that conveyed a whole treatise on the suppression of artistic impulse in the name of economic security. I hear it still, sometimes, when I’m pruning the hydrangeas. I actually did get into a rather prestigious landscape architecture program, you know. Back in '65. Had the acceptance letter framed, for a while. It hung next to my drawing of a Japanese garden, all precise angles and carefully placed stones. But then the tuition bill came, and my dad just looked at it, then at me, and said, "That’s a lot of money to spend on dirt, isn’t it, son?" And I… well, I folded. I pivoted, as they say now. To auditing. More predictable, certainly. Less dirt. More numbers. Safer. And I was GOOD at it, mind you. EXCELLENT, even. The meticulousness required for untangling complex financial structures actually appealed to a certain part of my brain. The part that could spot a single out-of-place leaf in a meticulously designed border, perhaps. For decades, I convinced myself it was enough. The house, the car, the nice holidays. The respect of my peers, the steady promotions. I developed an almost pathological need for order, a sort of obsessive compulsion to categorize and quantify everything. Probably a coping mechanism, now that I think about it. A way to feel in control of something when the main trajectory of my life felt utterly out of my hands. And I'd scoff, inwardly, at the younger accountants who'd complain about "burnout" or "existential dread" after a particularly grueling tax season. Amateur hour, I'd think. This is just… life. You do what you have to do. But now, looking at my own garden, the one I’ve spent the last twenty years meticulously planning and cultivating, every stone, every shrub, every little ground cover placed with a kind of fervent, almost spiritual intention… well. It just hits different. The way the light filters through the birch leaves, the smell of damp earth after a rain, the subtle shift in color of the hostas through the seasons. It's a language I always understood, I think. A grammar of space and texture and light. And I spent my entire career translating the dead language of corporate accounting instead. And I don’t know. It’s not regret, exactly. More like… a dull ache. A phantom limb sensation for a life I never quite lived. A quiet, persistent sadness, like the rustling of dry leaves on a still evening.