The clover’s come back thick around the edge of the garden,
and the wrens have returned to the same crooked gourd I strung on a wire last spring.

This morning, the breeze smelled faintly of sweetgrass
and something older—
a whisper from the dirt that didn’t ask for forgiveness because it never sinned.

I sat with my coffee, listening to the creek’s thin sermon,
and thought of Ivan Karamazov, his forehead in his hands,
rejecting a world where children suffer.

My backyard does not argue.
It grows.
It bears witness in moss and spiders and silence.
It does not rage against God or man,
but it does not forget, either.

Some days I’m Alyosha,
offering kindness like twine, hoping it holds.
Some days I am Dmitri,
wild with want, trying to outrun my own story.
And sometimes—God help me—
I am Ivan,
reading the news and walking away
from belief like it’s a burning shed.

But then a finch lands on the edge of the rain barrel.
Then a bee hums low in the mint.
Then the wind lifts a corner of last year’s leaf mulch,
revealing a single green shoot,
insisting on its right to return.

And suddenly, I am no one from a Russian novel—
just a woman in Berea,
barefoot in the grass,
trying to answer with her hands.