i walked past the community garden today on my way back from the store just a quick run for milk and it hit me like a physical punch in the gut all those raised beds bursting with kale and heirloom tomatoes and the smell of fresh earth after that rain yesterday and i just froze you know i used to wake up to that smell every morning on the farm my parents farm the one i left twenty-five years ago and for what a corner office a fancy title a life where the closest i get to dirt is a potted plant on my window sill and even that usually dies i mean who am i kidding the kids are grown now out of the house doing their own thing and my husband he’s great he really is but we just sort of coexist now you know we watch tv we eat dinner we talk about bills the weather the kids but it’s like there’s this HUGE silence between us this unspoken thing this question hanging there in the air sometimes i swear i can almost hear it screaming like a siren i remember vividly the day i told my dad i was leaving he just looked at me over his bifocals holding a handful of rich dark soil and he said something like you think the grass is greener over there don’t you and i was so young so SURE of myself i just nodded and said i needed more than dirt and cows i needed to prove myself i needed to be SOMEONE beyond anna’s girl from the farm and he just sighed and said well you better make sure it’s worth it anna and i swear that sigh it still haunts my sleep sometimes it’s like a low drone a constant buzzing in the back of my brain and now here i am fifty-something walking past a community garden feeling this SHARP ache this regret that’s so deep it feels like it’s burrowed into my bones what was i thinking what were any of us thinking chasing after this idea of success this corporate ladder this shiny meaningless stuff when all along the real stuff the good stuff was right there under my feet we’re such fools aren’t we us humans we spend our whole lives running from what we have convinced ourselves is not enough only to realize much much later when it’s probably too late that what we had was EVERYTHING and we just couldn’t see it then blinded by some stupid ambition some idea of what happiness was supposed to look like i stood there for what felt like an hour just watching a young couple tending their plot their hands covered in mud laughing and i wanted to cry i wanted to scream i wanted to just walk in there and grab a handful of that rich earth and just feel it again the realness of it the honesty of it instead i just walked away clutching my milk my corporate identity like a shield a very very thin shield that feels like it’s about to shatter any second and now i’m here alone in my kitchen the quiet of the house pressing in on me and i just can’t shake it this feeling of having made a TERRIBLE mistake a colossal irreversible mistake that has shaped my whole life and who i am now this hollowed-out version of anna who has everything and absolutely nothing all at the same time and i don’t know what to do with that knowledge i really truly don’t