I was sixty, seven years into life without my husband

I never expected that a patch of soil would be the thing that helped put me back together.

I was sixty, seven years into life without my husband, and the silence in my house had grown heavier with time. I tried to outrun it. I joined book clubs that didn’t interest me and volunteered at church more from habit than joy. I kept the television on in the evenings just to fill the rooms with sound. Nothing truly eased the loneliness—until the day I decided to dig into the earth behind the shed.