He held the edging shears
like the world only stayed steady
if he kept cutting.
Like order was a thing he could still shape
with his hands,
one clean snip at a time.

I stood beside him,
small, bright,
orbiting his gravity
without understanding its pull.

He didn’t teach with words.
He taught with posture,
with the slow choreography of care,
with the quiet insistence
that some things must be kept neat
even when life refuses to be.

The pipe smoke curled around him
like time trying to hold on.
I laughed without knowing
that moments like this
don’t repeat.
That one day
I’d look at this photograph
and feel the air shift
as if he’d just stepped out of frame.

The house behind us
was more than red brick.
It was a witness.
It was a place that remembers
the sound of his breath
and the shape of my childhood
better than I do.

The grass seemed greener.
The sky was too calm.
The world was too unaware
that one of us would vanish
long before I learned
how to hold a tool
without trembling.

This isn’t nostalgia.
It’s a fault line.
A snapshot of the exact moment
before I understood
that love can be sharp,
that legacy can be silent,
that grief can hide
in the clean edge of a lawn.

And now,
decades later,
I’m the one holding the shears,
trying to cut the world
into a shape that makes sense,
wondering if he’d approve,
and wondering if he ever felt
as unfinished as I do.