You know, sometimes you just… you’re standing there, by the kitchen window, looking out at the backyard. It’s like, 2 AM, right? Everyone’s asleep. The dog’s even quiet for once. And you're just looking at the garden you paid a guy to put in, that little japanese maple and the river stones, the way the moon hits it all wrong from the neighbor’s floodlight. And it hits you. Not like a truck, more like… a really slow, heavy feeling. It starts with the grass, I guess. You see a patch that’s kinda yellow, even though you just fertilized it. And then you remember old Mr. Henderson, two houses down, the one who actually *grew* his own tomatoes and had those perfect rose bushes. He always knew what was wrong with the soil just by looking at it. And you think, “man, that guy really loved his yard.” And then it’s like a switch flips in your head, and you remember the smell of fresh cut grass from when you were a kid, but not the mower guy’s smell, *your* smell. Because I used to love all that. Not just the grass, but the dirt, the way roots tangle up, the whole thing. I remember sketching out plans for my mom’s flower beds, even when I was, like, 12. Had this whole notebook filled with different types of shrubs, perennials, water features even. WATER FEATURES! Like I was going to build a koi pond in our tiny suburban yard. My dad, he’d just kinda chuckle and pat my head. “That’s a nice hobby, son,” he’d say. He wanted me to be an engineer, something sensible. And then, somewhere along the line, you go to college, and everyone’s talking about business school, or law school, or being a doctor. And there’s this pressure, you know? To pick something… respectable. Something that makes good money. Landscape architecture? That just sounded like… playing in the dirt for grown-ups. Not serious. Not for someone who was supposed to be SMART. So I went with accounting. It made sense. Numbers are numbers. You just add them up. And I was good at it. REALLY good at it. For thirty-something years, I’ve been good at it. Auditing corporate spreadsheets. Looking for discrepancies. Making sure the numbers balance. Sitting in an office, sometimes looking out a window at a parking lot, sometimes at another building. And you get those bonuses, you get the promotions, you get the corner office eventually. You get the house in the suburbs with the nice garden you don't even plant yourself. You send your kids to good schools, they go to good colleges. They’re doing well. You have a comfortable life. But sometimes, when you’re staring at that yellow patch of lawn at 2 AM, or when you’re driving past some new development and you see them putting in the trees, like real trees, not just saplings, and you think about how they planned that out, the shadows they’re going to cast… you just feel this hollowed-out thing inside. Like you picked the wrong road, way back when, and now it’s too late to turn around. You're too old. Too much invested. Who’s going to hire a 58-year-old accountant to design their backyard? Sounds ridiculous, even to me. You can’t just ditch everything. Your wife, she’d look at you like you’d lost your mind. Your kids, they’d probably tell you to go to therapy. Your neighbors, they’d whisper. “Did you hear about Bob? He just… quit. To plant flowers.” It just sounds… flaky. After all this time, all the effort, all the status. To trade it all for… dirt. It’s just not done. Not in our neighborhood. Not when you’ve got a perfectly good CPA license. So you just stand there, in the dark, watching the moon hit those river stones all wrong. And you think about how much you could have known about plants by now. How many different types of soil you could recognize. The smell of a really good compost pile, not just the stuff you buy in bags. And you feel this kinda… regret. Not a sharp, painful regret, but a dull ache that just sits there, right behind your ribs. And you just know it's not gonna go away. It’s just part of the furniture now. Another thing you gotta live with.