I suppose it’s a bit silly, isn’t it, to be typing this out at… oh, past two, by the look of the clock on the stove. Garden’s been calling to me all day. Not literally, of course, that would be rather alarming at my age. But it’s there, just beyond the window, that patch of land I’ve tended for… well, since Ethel and I bought this place after I finished with the university. Goodness, that was a long time ago. Seventy-six now. The years have a way of just… slipping through your fingers, don’t they? Like fine soil. And looking at it tonight, the moonlight catching the dew on the hostas I finally got to split last spring – they were terribly congested, you see, causing a good bit of chlorosis in the younger leaves, nothing a good division couldn't fix – it makes me think. Or rather, it makes me feel. A pang, really. A familiar sort of wistful ache right here in the chest, where a man keeps his regrets, I suppose. It’s not a sorrowful pang, mind you, not like when Ethel passed. That was an acute grief, a sharp, disorienting agony that altered the very tectonics of my existence. This is more… chronic. A background hum, a low-grade melancholia, if you will, a constant companion that only truly makes itself known when I’m still enough to listen. Like now. I often wonder if I made the right choices. Not that there were many choices, really. Not in a place like this, not back then. You went to school, you got a trade or a degree, and you settled down. My father, bless his practical soul, had a very clear trajectory for me. "A solid profession, son," he’d say, polishing his spectacles, "something with numbers. Numbers don't lie. Provide security." And so, after my baccalaureate, it was straight into accounting. Corporate tax law, to be precise. Auditing spreadsheets. Reconciling discrepancies. Ensuring fiscal probity, as they say in the textbooks. I remember my final year, though, before the grim realities of professional life settled in. I took an elective, a sort of lark, really. Landscape design. Just one course, on a whim. And it was… revelatory. I can still recall the smell of the drafting paper, the way the graphite smudged just so on my fingers. Learning about site analysis, the principles of spatial organization, the aesthetic considerations of plant material, the nuances of hydrology and soil mechanics… it wasn’t just pretty pictures. It was a rigorous discipline, an art informed by science. I spent hours in the university arboretum, sketching, identifying species, understanding their specific light requirements, their mature sizes, their pest susceptibilities. I found myself drawn to the Latin binomials, the precise classifications, more than I ever was to the general ledger. There was a moment, clear as day, I can still see it. We were on a field trip to a particularly well-regarded municipal park, the one with the rhododendron collection. And the professor, Dr. Alistair Finch, a rather eccentric but brilliant man who always smelled faintly of compost and pipe tobacco, he was explaining the concept of 'ecological succession' as it applied to the park’s various plantings. And I felt it, a sudden surge of something… almost like an epiphany. A profound sense of belonging, a recognition that THIS was what I was meant to do. To shape the land, to work with its inherent forces, to create beauty and function. Not just to record the expenditures and income of some faceless corporation. I even started putting together a portfolio. Sketchbooks filled with plans for fictional gardens, detailed elevations, even a few tentative proposals for friends' backyards. I showed them to Ethel once. She was sweet, of course. "They're lovely, dear," she said, though I could see in her eyes that familiar flicker of polite bewilderment. She knew I was good at accounting. That was the known quantity. The secure path. And who was I to argue with security? Especially when my parents had scraped and saved for my education. The pressure, you see, it wasn't just external. It was internalized. A sense of obligation, a duty to utilize the opportunities afforded me. So I put the sketchbooks away. Buried them in the attic, really. And I became a tax accountant. A good one, by all accounts. Very thorough. Never missed a decimal point. My clients appreciated my meticulous nature, my ability to untangle even the most convoluted financial skeins. I built a very comfortable life for Ethel and me. We traveled, we had a lovely home, we contributed to the community. I was, by all external measures, a successful man. Respected, even. But inside… inside it always felt a little hollow. Like a beautifully constructed box, perfectly sound, but empty. I remember once, quite late in my career, during a particularly grueling audit for a large agricultural conglomerate – all quarterly reports and capital gains taxes – I was sitting in a windowless conference room, staring at a spreadsheet filled with numbers that seemed to blur into an indistinguishable grey, and I thought, quite distinctly, 'I would rather be pruning roses right now.' Or designing a rainwater harvesting system. Or even just identifying a particularly resilient cultivar of daylily. Anything but this. This sterile, quantifiable void. Now, as I sit here, my old bones protesting the late hour, the garden still visible through the glass, I can still feel that longing. That alternative life, unlived. The landscape architect, perhaps with a small, thriving practice here in the valley, maybe specializing in native plant restoration or sustainable design. A man who spent his days with his hands in the earth, not on a calculator. Would I have been happier? It’s a purely hypothetical question, of course, a counterfactual. And at 76, there's no turning back the clock to find out. But that question, it persists. It's the silent witness to every audit report I ever signed, every fiscal year I ever closed. And sometimes, like tonight, it feels almost… palpable. A ghost of a different me, just beyond the window, tending to the phlox.