Speaker 1: The fountain had always been perfectly centered between the twin
Speaker 1: rows of view, or so I'd believed that sharp acts
Speaker 1: as a living spine of clipped green. A rowing straight
Speaker 1: through the heart of Nova Stadium Park felt as familiar
Speaker 1: as the lines on my own palm. But as I
Speaker 1: returned there for the first time in four years, I
Speaker 1: stopped half way down the main walk, blinking against sunlight
Speaker 1: and memory. There it was the left you walk held
Speaker 1: one more tree than the right, all trees broad. At
Speaker 1: the base there shadowed footprints, still dusting the sandy path.
Speaker 1: They bulged forward, twelve on the left, eleven on the right,
Speaker 1: not an optical trick. I counted twice, then a third,
Speaker 1: a third time. Yet somehow an initial SHARKO wasn't afraid
Speaker 1: or disoriented. It was the queasy trill of sparting a
Speaker 1: discrepancy in a trusted friend's face. Perfect symagery had ruled
Speaker 1: here since the garden's first shovelful, subject to a thousand
Speaker 1: retellings and restoration efforts, and I had spent nearly four
Speaker 1: decades grooming that allusion to a razor edge. Had A
Speaker 1: truly failed to notice a floor so avert for so
Speaker 1: long but all parks possess their own trickers, and geometry
Speaker 1: is the least stable thing. Shrubs, swell roots, buckle paving stones, city,
Speaker 1: budget's water away up pocision. I ran a finger across
Speaker 1: my brow and calls up a mental map I tended
Speaker 1: for my entire career. I could, if pressed, list each
Speaker 1: use minor quirks. The stubby twelve, with its two knotted
Speaker 1: trunk flares, should have mirrored its counterpart on the right.
Speaker 1: Gazing down the walk again, I struggled to police the
Speaker 1: certainty that all my tours, all my lectures, all my
Speaker 1: hours with gard and apprentices, had revolved around the foundation
Speaker 1: of even as twelve and twelve, each a green mirror
Speaker 1: to its opposite measure, shoulder to shoulder, with severe string
Speaker 1: and patience. Yet there I stood, no guarden tools in hand,
Speaker 1: nothing but my batter, canvas, satchel, and a mind stubbornly
Speaker 1: snagged on one missing match, a memory mistake, perhaps the
Speaker 1: sort that accumulates in retirement, some subtle divergence between what's
Speaker 1: remembered and was recorded. The world that children experience is
Speaker 1: rarely the one written in text books. And who was
Speaker 1: I now if not a grandchild? Of my own curi delusions.
Speaker 1: I'd certainly become more suspicious about memory since leaving city service.
Speaker 1: Maybe my mind had quietly idealized the garden had spent
Speaker 1: so long tending fill in missing rose or smoothing off
Speaker 1: edges in its private mod Still, as the day wore
Speaker 1: on and to a group's drifted by, something in me
Speaker 1: fixed on that single stubborn extra tree. I watched some
Speaker 1: glide down the clip flanks, each passing out deepening. Not
Speaker 1: my discomfort, but a granula almost mathematical curiosity. Could the
Speaker 1: addition have gone unotice during my years in charge? Impossible?
Speaker 1: But there it was, not just in the trees, but
Speaker 1: in a careful way. Each subsequent visitors as flickered over
Speaker 1: the walk without the faintest jolt of surprise. It wasn't
Speaker 1: the feeling of discovery or even loss, more like standing
Speaker 1: at the edge of a familiar pond and glimpsing for
Speaker 1: the first time a ripple moving against the prevailing wind,
Speaker 1: odd but not hostile, peculiar and yet almost imbiting. I
Speaker 1: left the axis and wandered deeper into the garden, certain
Speaker 1: only that I had to return in the coming days,
Speaker 1: not to find fault, but to find sense I am
Speaker 1: not by temperament. A dramatic person. Retirement was meant to
Speaker 1: be the long exhalation after forty sit a season's pacing
Speaker 1: brick grass with pruning shears or clipboard. Twice before that
Speaker 1: spring I tried to visit the gardens and been turned
Speaker 1: away by fatigue or rain. So this returned journey, which
Speaker 1: had seemed merely rich la nod to my old bones,
Speaker 1: a stroll for a nostalgia tok on in unexpected momentum
Speaker 1: so unbalancing energy. The park itself was just waking to
Speaker 1: the city's late April bustle jog encircling the periphery, students
Speaker 1: sprawling across the river lawn with sketch paths, elder the
Speaker 1: Madge on faithful clacking tiles on a shaded terrace between
Speaker 1: the eu walks and the circular rose beds. The air
Speaker 1: shimmered with small believed in routines, families setting up their
Speaker 1: Saturday picnics. The Glass House Cafe, my old haunt, was
Speaker 1: fogged with the steam of cappuccino and the thrum of conversation.
Speaker 1: I nodded to Lucia now had gardner sturdy some burned
Speaker 1: woman with an architect's blunt practicality, who was deep in
Speaker 1: rumination with a new intern in emmil Emil all bristlet
Speaker 1: energy and clumsy reverence, darted away from their note taking
Speaker 1: to jug after me, Senor Donardi, He called, I saw
Speaker 1: your name on the membership plaque. You're really here. It's
Speaker 1: strange how quickly institutional memory clings to certain figures long
Speaker 1: after they leave the daily order of things. I answered
Speaker 1: him with a smile, resisting the urge to smooth the
Speaker 1: sweat matted tufts of his hair, as I might have
Speaker 1: with my own apprentice years ago. Just a quick walk, Emma,
Speaker 1: trying to remember what it feels like to have somewhere important,
Speaker 1: to be at Summise, He looked ready to burst into
Speaker 1: a thousand questions. We're trying double layered lavender in the
Speaker 1: partner at Lucia's for work in the East beds. But well,
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to be tracking rue shadow, not pest rotation.
Speaker 1: Something about data for the Mayor's office. Did you ever
Speaker 1: have to too many days with clipboard? Not enough of
Speaker 1: trouble that confided, you'll learn to love both, You'll find
Speaker 1: your balance. He grinned, unconsciously echoing the symmetry of the
Speaker 1: garden itself. Yet now thinking of the off balance use
Speaker 1: that echoed that it oddly inside my chest. I returned
Speaker 1: to the Yu walkers the morning to hiss assemble, each
Speaker 1: led by a city appointed dose in whose script I
Speaker 1: must have heard a thousand times. The merreat gardens, nova
Speaker 1: stage end's pride too perfect U walks facing one another
Speaker 1: since sixteen twenty seven, symmetrical design inspired by the Italian
Speaker 1: meniscence said yell. The gestures like conductors. Button's describe invisible
Speaker 1: axes overheads busy snapping phone pictures. Nobody paused account of course,
Speaker 1: tourists ice skated along, pleased by the suggestion of order.
Speaker 1: Locals paid less attention, minds on errands or lover's rendezvous.
Speaker 1: But standing in that slight offset between trees, watching sun
Speaker 1: lance off the gravel, I was reminded of the city's
Speaker 1: love affair with its own patterns. Baroque fountains, labyrinthine streets
Speaker 1: laid up for defense and display food. Kiosks never stray
Speaker 1: in a meter from their latta grids. Every flourish in
Speaker 1: this place was shaped by someone many someones devoted to
Speaker 1: the principle that discipline Bill's beauty. I'd been such a someone.
Speaker 1: My career stitch through with endless city minutes and faded
Speaker 1: planting locks, lived in that mesh of rule and rhythm.
Speaker 1: I taught generations of caretakers the importance of alignments so
Speaker 1: subtle only their feet would tell the difference. We measured
Speaker 1: hedges down to the centimeter. I'd at lasted seven city
Speaker 1: administrators and five park commissioners. I married here, divorced here,
Speaker 1: retired here, always under the discipline a sword, a private
Speaker 1: priesthood of symmetrical intent. The u Walks earned their legend
Speaker 1: three centuries of small acts. No single photograph ever captured
Speaker 1: the spacial music that lived in the mind's eye after
Speaker 1: walking them, the satisfaction of lines converging just so as
Speaker 1: ye turned the acxis and surveyed their balance. It was
Speaker 1: a living rehearsal, repeated endlessly, believed so deeply that the
Speaker 1: belief itself became part of the garden's substance. And perhaps
Speaker 1: that was my failing. Belief can be tenacious a muscle
Speaker 1: that grows stronger precisely where you never try to test
Speaker 1: its resistance. I paused half way down the right walk,
Speaker 1: allowing a pair of students to pass. One pointed at
Speaker 1: the far fountain, whispering something a joke about running lapse.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the sight line shifted. I let my gaze follow
Speaker 1: the gravel to the base of the eleventh hue, pausing carefully,
Speaker 1: trying to will into existence a twelfth shadow that wasn't there.
Speaker 1: Nothing changed as I moved off the main axis. The
Speaker 1: low hum of the city returned in force, the ruine
Speaker 1: of bicycles, the clatter of Rabuscu's coins, the ordinary during
Speaker 1: noises of a park that hadn't changed, and yet through
Speaker 1: my eyes no longer quite matched itself. Still it was curiosity,
Speaker 1: not an ease that lingered on my tongue, a flavor
Speaker 1: as persistent as risen under the nails. I promised myself
Speaker 1: I'd return, just to look again with clear eyes, perhaps,
Speaker 1: or take measure in my hand. If there was an
Speaker 1: answer here, I was sure it would reveal itself with
Speaker 1: a little more patience, as had all of the gardens
Speaker 1: quarks over the years. The next morning broke with brittle
Speaker 1: blue light, one of the spring days when when calves
Speaker 1: the air into bright, wakeful shots. I stood again before
Speaker 1: the eu walks, this time with Lucia beside me. Her
Speaker 1: hands staining green at the finger tips, moved absently as
Speaker 1: she surveyed the line of trees. Lucia, I said, quietly,
Speaker 1: the EU walk. Does it seem different to you? On
Speaker 1: the axis? I mean, how many trees do you count
Speaker 1: in each row? She glanced down the walk, counting almost
Speaker 1: by habit that side O twelve, this eleven? Same as ever?
Speaker 1: Why is Emmo's count off? No? No, I said, I
Speaker 1: was just remembering. I had this feeling. We always matched
Speaker 1: them twelve and twelve for as long as I can recall.
Speaker 1: The balance was the legend. Lucia cocked her head, lips pursed.
Speaker 1: Maybe early on, but as long as I've been here
Speaker 1: twenty three years, the left bank has always carried an extra.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's the story I give the school groups.
Speaker 1: Its outwist. People expect Puffeck's symmetry. We deliver a character.
Speaker 1: She chuckled, as if for siding a minor heresy. You
Speaker 1: sure you're not thinking of Crevesky Park. Some of those
Speaker 1: city beds are almost surgical in their neatness. I shook
Speaker 1: my head. No, Lucia, here the axis our axis? Hum
Speaker 1: She rubbed her temple with the back of one knuckle.
Speaker 1: We could pull the visitor brouchers, those that op photo
Speaker 1: from the city's centenary over at the pavilion. You remember,
Speaker 1: we crossed the broad terrace where peacocks sometimes roamed. Slipping
Speaker 1: into the visitor center's foyer is Lionstone dazzling in the
Speaker 1: spring sun. Lucia rooted about in a glass top display table,
Speaker 1: lifting a glossy trifle from a wreck as cover glowed
Speaker 1: with a familiar aial photo of stalwart used flanking the
Speaker 1: gravel at twelve on the left, eleven on the right.
Speaker 1: The label's original axis is Turk Cemetery read the same.
Speaker 1: Beside the brouchers, a frame CP photograph hung on the
Speaker 1: wall late nineteenth century, faded to a palette uchre and chocoal,
Speaker 1: but unmistakable the eu walks crisper in age with that
Speaker 1: unmistakable lopside at march. The extra tree fat and formal
Speaker 1: even then anchored the left axis, throwing the classical illusion
Speaker 1: off its dride. Lucia watched me with a fond, expectant smile.
Speaker 1: All the record show it's always been this way. Maybe
Speaker 1: you've just been away too long, as scrutin as the
Speaker 1: photo cloud's masted above in slur spring to urbulence, there
Speaker 1: shapes a distant echo of the asymmetry below. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just my error, apparently it was built into the bones
Speaker 1: of the garden's documented past. A group of garden dosant
Speaker 1: lounging in the lobby between tours, overheard our conversation and
Speaker 1: sidled over with practiced community theater animation. Oh yes, chirup Dandon,
Speaker 1: the most enthusiastic of the bunch. The left walk is
Speaker 1: longer by one. There's even a tradition we trim a
Speaker 1: little jauntier on the odd numbered side to honor the
Speaker 1: city's quirky spirit. That how old Mayor de Leaci hold it.
Speaker 1: In his day. They say it's good luck to enter
Speaker 1: the garden from the heavier walk. Kintessa Marta, or retired
Speaker 1: school teacher, nodded agreeably. You know, my grandmother used to
Speaker 1: see a life always leans a little to the left
Speaker 1: in nova. Stay John, don't trouble yourself with old measurements, dear,
Speaker 1: just enjoy it. Polite laughter followed. The docents offered a
Speaker 1: slurry of local stories. Apprentice gardeners count in the use
Speaker 1: of part of a graduation prank painters using the offset
Speaker 1: walk as a compositional challenge, pairs of lovers meeting at
Speaker 1: the awkward yew. For them, asymmetry was ancient, even revered
Speaker 1: a quirk. Yes, but the city zone. Standing there, I
Speaker 1: felt the surge of mild dislocation, the sus the same
Speaker 1: one that follows after missing a familiar bus stop or
Speaker 1: finding a door handle, Aswat sides overnight. But it was fleeting,
Speaker 1: swept away by the sheer density of cheerful certainty around me.
Speaker 1: Nobody doubted the odd count. Nobody recalled another arrangement, not
Speaker 1: in any serious way. Even Lucia, pragmatic and dry eye,
Speaker 1: seemed more amused than confounded. Perhaps I'm slipping, I said, softly,
Speaker 1: These trees, they begin to play tricks on us as
Speaker 1: we age. He've earned the right to see any shape
Speaker 1: you like, Lucia replied, touching my arm. The gardeners remember
Speaker 1: with their hands, not their eyes. Politeness or affection hard
Speaker 1: to say, but it left me no less fixated on
Speaker 1: the puzzle. If the park's public memory was so firm,
Speaker 1: what hope did I have of tracing the origin of
Speaker 1: this lopsided conviction? Yet the presence of material evidence the
Speaker 1: burchuers the photograph pulled at my skepticism. Surely somewhere an
Speaker 1: official plan or a faded blueprint would reveal the change,
Speaker 1: or at least the moment the story split. Old habits
Speaker 1: asserting themselves. I resolved to test the history with less
Speaker 1: yielding tools. The municipal archives, hidden in the bowels of
Speaker 1: the old tax office always carried the mothball peak of
Speaker 1: Vanish municipal priorities. I flashed my volunteer merit dispadge on
Speaker 1: an elderly clock, short, tallow skinned, willing to look the
Speaker 1: other way for an ex horticulturist pointed me to rower
Speaker 1: flap files containing the park's oc tectonic blueprints. I spread
Speaker 1: them on a battered oak table. Year's pressing collus. The
Speaker 1: earliest I could find, a brittle villain dated seventeen thirty.
Speaker 1: When assured the EU walks just as they stood, twelve
Speaker 1: on the left, eleven on the right. A clerkly notation
Speaker 1: three hundred years ago labeled it long Access leff Rich.
Speaker 1: In subsequent plants eighteen forty five, nineteen o seven, nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty two, the arrangement persisted, marked with fading red lines
Speaker 1: and circle numerals. The modern typriton guides a park's restoration
Speaker 1: survey from the nineteen eighties. The landscape masterpen signed by
Speaker 1: my own hand, all recorded the extra U always on
Speaker 1: the left, always one on paired trunk bulging at the curve.
Speaker 1: I found three yellowed clippings from the city's chronicle. No
Speaker 1: veastagians feigned lopsided you walk remains of regional peculiarity. One
Speaker 1: headline declared above a black and white snapshot of the
Speaker 1: warp baded and gala landings. A local columnist nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: four riffed on our tradition of almost symmetry, why not
Speaker 1: let a garden be a little bit human? I bought
Speaker 1: a handful of old postcards from a used book stalled
Speaker 1: just outside the archive gates, several from the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: to prewar a gloss in nineteen nineties specimen that looks
Speaker 1: suspiciously like it had been colorized. Each depicted the main
Speaker 1: new walk from a slightly different angle. None were perfect.
Speaker 1: Crowds and shadows mudded half the views, but where the
Speaker 1: roast had exposed, twelve views showed to the left eleven
Speaker 1: to the right. On the reverse, the faded scroll and
Speaker 1: fountain pen. Here we walked, counting trees and losing tract
Speaker 1: just after the last on the heavy side, my own
Speaker 1: faint handwriting, forty years younger, adorned a card had mailed
Speaker 1: my parents upon receiving my first permanent posting. I walked
Speaker 1: these rows each morning, so now memorize every pair was
Speaker 1: thus simply a tone of phrase or a slip born
Speaker 1: of an unexamined assumption. The city's design historians seemed resolved
Speaker 1: to the lob sizedness as well. In the dusty reference
Speaker 1: stacks of the University, I found thick, worshipful tomes, the
Speaker 1: geometries of nova stadio, and horticultural drama in civic space,
Speaker 1: each laid out the garden planned the left row, always
Speaker 1: one tree richer from seeing the city's famously unbalanced beds.
Speaker 1: Occasionally a passing scholar would annotate, legend has the garden's
Speaker 1: original design coal for a perfect axis mirrabileies, but construction
Speaker 1: flaws or changes and patronage led to the distinctive leftward bulge.
Speaker 1: It was there again, afeandecho some past striving for symmetry,
Speaker 1: but no evidence it had ever been realized in practice.
Speaker 1: Modern sources reinforced the picture, tourism sites, digital photographs, the
Speaker 1: city's infamously unreliable Wikipedia entry, unique left, heavy ue axis,
Speaker 1: hissoric oddness, debated origins coalesced around the same baseline. Even
Speaker 1: drawn shop videos, their wide lens exposing every variegated line
Speaker 1: and patch of worn grass, produced the same count as
Speaker 1: my recent walk. Yet in all this a peculiar pattern persisted,
Speaker 1: minor inconsistencies in all descriptions, an occasional mismatch in date.
Speaker 1: I found a guide's text from a nineteen twelve festival
Speaker 1: that described a freshly matched parade of green, plausible only
Speaker 1: a free asopoetic flourish. But each rec could seem to reinforce,
Speaker 1: not undermine, the reality before me eleven and twelve, never
Speaker 1: twelve and twelve, not since any documentable age. And those
Speaker 1: who lived in the city longer than I, the acquaintances
Speaker 1: who met me for coffee at the park's edge, all
Speaker 1: shook their heads and quite wonder at my strange be occupation.
Speaker 1: A retired violin, as remembered caught in my husband along
Speaker 1: the slow walk under the elder years, always seven steps
Speaker 1: from the odd turn Bartlow, the bread shop owner, reminisced
Speaker 1: about hiding in a shadow of the grand awkward extra
Speaker 1: after a bot soccer match as a boy, A math
Speaker 1: teacher who walked out when sons through the garden each Saturday, volunteered.
Speaker 1: We even had a silly rhyme in school left for
Speaker 1: for loon lack rode for speed, because there was always
Speaker 1: an extra you to touch at the end. A dawned
Speaker 1: on me at the collective memory of Novastadia, and had
Speaker 1: settled so firmly on the asymmetric image that my own
Speaker 1: certainty seemed feigned, even fantasmic by comparison. Yet my hands,
Speaker 1: aching with old calluses, recalled every line drawn, every string
Speaker 1: poll top, from rebase to root base. I could all
Speaker 1: but taste the cool reciniss air of the axis as
Speaker 1: it should have been, not as it was restless. I
Speaker 1: began sketching from memory at night, shuffling kitchen chairs to
Speaker 1: simulate the walk's gentle gredient in the spilled lamp light.
Speaker 1: I drew the mirror garden a perfect twin set of rows,
Speaker 1: balanced as a child scales, But through some private suit prestition,
Speaker 1: I never showed these sketches to anyone. One evening I
Speaker 1: met up with Aldo, an all friend from the city's
Speaker 1: mapping division, over Vermouth at the river side. We taught
Speaker 1: what maps could and kuldn't. Do you know what they
Speaker 1: say about territory and map, although joked raising his glass,
Speaker 1: neither ever tells you the whole story. I suppose you
Speaker 1: want to know which is a fault this time, he
Speaker 1: told me of a handful of European parks with their
Speaker 1: own quiet rearrangements. In Bruges, you have the hedge walls
Speaker 1: that once lined up perfectly with the cathedral spire, but
Speaker 1: a lightning strike in eighteen ninety shifted everything half a degree.
Speaker 1: For years, official records denied it. In Paris they kept
Speaker 1: all garden plants on vellum, but shifted to gravel edges
Speaker 1: after each revolution. So the ghost of the old walk
Speaker 1: still rises in photographs, though no frut will ever land there.
Speaker 1: I recount of my findings, the density of records insisting
Speaker 1: on a symmetry. Here, that's the curious part, he replied.
Speaker 1: Usually it's the world that slit and the documentation lacks
Speaker 1: behind or denies anything happened in your garden. The material
Speaker 1: and the historical are perfectly matched. Maybe your head is
Speaker 1: playing tricks. Easy to say, but the city was always
Speaker 1: obsessed with balance. To break that deliberately would have required
Speaker 1: a revolution. No one admits to Aldo shrugged, but ye
Speaker 1: know how Patents burrow Deep spent four decades staring at geometry,
Speaker 1: prining for balance, living in plots and angles. Your mind
Speaker 1: adapts when its rays, its strays in ways that re
Speaker 1: enact the old ideals, costal order made personal. It's not
Speaker 1: a flaw, it is a consequence. An unfamiliar map emerges
Speaker 1: as much from longing as from accuracy. What a nerved
Speaker 1: me was in the possibility of my own error. But
Speaker 1: the graceful way the city had recusted its histories around
Speaker 1: the slop sided accomplishment never grieve in the loss perfection.
Speaker 1: I left all delayed, tired but galvanized. Was I chasing
Speaker 1: a ghost no one else could see? Or with their
Speaker 1: forces cultural mnemonic, perhaps even physical, by which a city
Speaker 1: slowly and unconsciously decided to reclassify what counted as true.
Speaker 1: In a quiet of home, I laid out old photos
Speaker 1: and park guides, drawing lines and ears in search of
Speaker 1: the smallest contradiction. I found none. I could truly lean on,
Speaker 1: not enough to revive the symmetry I knew only slippery hints,
Speaker 1: the brief anomaly of a festival they printed askew orchaetic
Speaker 1: hiss idle boast in some news archive. The contradiction had
Speaker 1: ceased being just numerical. It had become a matter of perception,
Speaker 1: an argument not just over what was, but over what
Speaker 1: had been allowed to survive in human memory. On a
Speaker 1: rainy afternoon, abandoning the archives and their stubborn gravities, I
Speaker 1: turned to the only place left for evidence not subject
Speaker 1: to the city's editing, my own past. I drove out
Speaker 1: to a storage yard south of the city walls, fumbling
Speaker 1: with a key to Unit one hundred four, where the
Speaker 1: relics of my park's authority career had sprawled in musty
Speaker 1: brown boxes and batter drafting tubes, faded labels Toupari nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six. Axis planned two thousand seven to note Donardi
Speaker 1: a most precious to me. The slim stack of Sketchbrooks
Speaker 1: had carried summer after summer, each leaf a palimpsyst of seasons.
Speaker 1: I wiped Audust off the oldest, flipping to student error diagrams,
Speaker 1: there it was Klean's memory. Twelve views per role, each
Speaker 1: tree mirror to its opposite numbers, circled in blue grease pencil.
Speaker 1: I tracked season after season of notations, but replaced for
Speaker 1: the U right sided edward matched to left, the prune
Speaker 1: axis equally from center line balance on both flanks. Even
Speaker 1: the foiled tabs I kept for fertilizer docing reed axis
Speaker 1: mirror both twelve units less ambiguously. I found a yellowed
Speaker 1: letter from my former apprentice Paolo. Can we revisit the
Speaker 1: string we used for splitting the beds last spring? Did
Speaker 1: we measure off both sides from the central and twelve
Speaker 1: and twelve as always? Or a my misremembering? Turning page
Speaker 1: after page, I watched my earlier self training apprentices die
Speaker 1: gramming the Umpro Contwinist of the US, using language that
Speaker 1: assumed took aughtterly for granted a mirrored arrangement. It's not
Speaker 1: nostalgia to say that every act of my working life
Speaker 1: stood as evidence for an equilibrium that now seemed to
Speaker 1: have only ever existed within the boundary of these ruckuss
Speaker 1: mine and pallows. Tought away unexamined, I returned home and
Speaker 1: dug out the book that had shaped both my formal
Speaker 1: education and my garden decisions. The rare treat Is by
Speaker 1: Luigi Badini, a Renaissance eccentric obsessed with absolute proportion. There
Speaker 1: in Crack Italian was the ideal garden, pairs of green
Speaker 1: ratios in whole numbers every avenue perphectly. I could left
Speaker 1: and right, no tolerance for odd numbers except in the
Speaker 1: most minor symbolic features. Somehow, all the city's current versions, photos, pamphlets,
Speaker 1: plans matched the folly of the world outside my own arcaves.
Speaker 1: Only this thin private world clung to a vanished order
Speaker 1: of things. I sat heavily, letting the paradox settle on
Speaker 1: my lap like a well fed cat. Collective record had
Speaker 1: gone one way, my solitary traces another. I felt neither
Speaker 1: fear nor lost. Something stranger, more piercing, the sense of
Speaker 1: being the only person alive who remembered the garden symmetrical axis,
Speaker 1: who could lay hands on blueprints and letters that attested
Speaker 1: to possibility. Nobody else would admit it ever existed. Later
Speaker 1: that week, I worked at the Courage to visit Pallo,
Speaker 1: my former apprentice. We'd lost touch after his early retirement.
Speaker 1: Brought on byon us, though it'd heard he lived these
Speaker 1: days in a small flat ab of the fishmongers, his
Speaker 1: heath inning, his hands less reliable for delicate work. I
Speaker 1: brought a box of the old plant as a kind
Speaker 1: of peace offering, as if to ask permission to interrogate
Speaker 1: our shared past. Pulo met me at the door, cautus
Speaker 1: but smiling. His once bright eyes were rimmed by deep circles,
Speaker 1: but the easy warmth of his handshake had not gone.
Speaker 1: We sat across an undersized kitchen table, sipentee that he
Speaker 1: apologized for scalding. Do you remember I began your first
Speaker 1: season working the EU walks with me? He grinned, reminiscence flashing,
Speaker 1: and his expression. He made me prune with two rulers
Speaker 1: camped together, so I wouldn't favor either side. I still
Speaker 1: think of us when I smell wet wool. I unrolled
Speaker 1: my diagram, pointing to the mirrored arrangement. Paolo tell me
Speaker 1: how many use on each row when we worked the walks,
Speaker 1: He hesitated, squinting at the paper. Twelve and twelve, wasn't it?
Speaker 1: You had us measure double just to make sure the
Speaker 1: line stayed even. He tapped the diagram with a finger,
Speaker 1: then round, peering harder. But now that I look, I
Speaker 1: was at the park with my nephew last autumn and
Speaker 1: he pointed out the left and more. I told him
Speaker 1: that wasn't right, but he counted with me, and there
Speaker 1: were twelve on the left, eleven on the right. Sure's day.
Speaker 1: I assumed one had died. Or perhaps I've just got
Speaker 1: in fuzzy. The records, the guides, they all show eleven
Speaker 1: and twelve, don't they. He ran a hand through his hair.
Speaker 1: It's hard, isn't it? When I picture it inside my head?
Speaker 1: The walks march out together like guards. But if I
Speaker 1: really think now, in the present, I can almost remember
Speaker 1: it always being a little unbalanced. We sat in silence,
Speaker 1: the teak of schooling. Maybe we taught ourselves to see
Speaker 1: what we wanted, he said quietly. Or perhaps things change
Speaker 1: while we're not looking. Only after I stood to leave
Speaker 1: Pawlow's unlingering on the page, his brow nodded and uncertainty.
Speaker 1: Did it occur to me that this confusion wasn't simple mine.
Speaker 1: Whatever had shifted it reached deeper than any single recollection.
Speaker 1: It threated through collective history. Official record even the lived
Speaker 1: memory of those he had touched, the used day after
Speaker 1: day out on the street, city light pooling gold between
Speaker 1: the tram lines, I felt more determined than ever not
Speaker 1: to settle for bewilderment whatever to answer collective delusion, shifting documentation,
Speaker 1: or something more elusive, I would keep tracing it to
Speaker 1: its source, following every scrap of my own all trail.
Speaker 1: However thinly the path might wind. Howlow's uncertainty lingered in
Speaker 1: the silence behind me as I stepped into the late afternoon,
Speaker 1: the streets rre them offered nothing from my particular confusion.
Speaker 1: Trams called by with their placid denouncements. Pigeons searched the curve,
Speaker 1: the park's boundary, walgglinged with an even light of a
Speaker 1: sun that must, after all, have set countless times on
Speaker 1: odd and even use. I held Pallow's wavering recollections along
Speaker 1: with my own, the effect not disheartening, but quietly electrifying,
Speaker 1: as if we had uncovered a secret path we no
Speaker 1: longer visible to the city itself. That night's sleep was
Speaker 1: a tight wind thing, crinkling with images of boxwood and ink,
Speaker 1: repeated counts and unpaired lines, flickering in the half dark
Speaker 1: in the morning, I resolved not to enact another round
Speaker 1: of counting. The numbers themselves had delivered all the contradiction
Speaker 1: they could. Instead, a deeper question began to worry at me.
Speaker 1: How did such a misfit impossible and everywhere dested, come
Speaker 1: to stand as the axis of so much local certainty.
Speaker 1: I returned to the park early, hours before most of
Speaker 1: the city stirred. The pass held that rare emptiness that
Speaker 1: only existed. Dawn birds sang with the quick, nervous intensity.
Speaker 1: The gravel crunch was my only interruption, and ever where
Speaker 1: the ewes bore their heavy dewl like metals from long service.
Speaker 1: I trailed my hand along the moss stone cup, letting
Speaker 1: muscle memory guide me, stepping out eleven spaces, then twelve,
Speaker 1: turning at the fountain's midpoint, as I had trained of
Speaker 1: those to do for years. Did my feet falter at
Speaker 1: the missing pair or just on their own to the
Speaker 1: prevailing layup. I tried walking the lines again, eyes closed,
Speaker 1: letting my body remember the instructions I must have imparted
Speaker 1: a thousand times. The first thing to strike me was
Speaker 1: that physically the garden offered no sign of re arrangement,
Speaker 1: no tell tale scar in the soil, no gash in
Speaker 1: the root system, no new bark. These hwes were old brutes,
Speaker 1: and woven through ten years or fifty trunks plump of time.
Speaker 1: If transplants or removals had shaped their order, they were hidden,
Speaker 1: almost as deeply as the question itself. A crouch examining
Speaker 1: the margin weather, twelve trees, roots nuzzled the compacted earth.
Speaker 1: It fit its place, as if always meant to be here,
Speaker 1: no scene betraying an afterthought or correction. With a world
Speaker 1: so stubbornly resistant to my memory, I began to search
Speaker 1: for less visible clues. Along the central axis. The fountains
Speaker 1: still sat ostensibly at the po's geometric hert as dictated
Speaker 1: by the treaties in which I had long found inspiration.
Speaker 1: Moving closer, I noticed, for the first time in years,
Speaker 1: perhaps ever truly looking, a subtle offset in Abysin's placement,
Speaker 1: not more than a handspan a fraction of the axis
Speaker 1: is width, but enough to render its mirrored reflection on
Speaker 1: the water no longer precisely bisected the symmetry. Once a
Speaker 1: principle I built every tur round was everywhell lopsided if
Speaker 1: one bothered to look for it. Throwing my fingers over
Speaker 1: the ancient marble, I tried to recall if this offset
Speaker 1: had ever figured in any of our discussions, or in
Speaker 1: the cold field notes I carried in my first seasons.
Speaker 1: I closed my eyes. The fountain's barwable was joined by
Speaker 1: the mechanical yawn of a nearby pump. The welt carrying on,
Speaker 1: indifferent to subtle misalignments. Both urns that marked the eastern
Speaker 1: approach now lacked a partner on the far side. Three
Speaker 1: standing were once Surely there must have been four, or
Speaker 1: hadir I set out across the garden, casting my gaze
Speaker 1: wider was as pattern present elsewhere. A rose bed that
Speaker 1: seemed to bulge off its long axis. A pair of
Speaker 1: poppers in a northeast memorial grove, now standing slightly further
Speaker 1: apart than my hands used to measure. But no these,
Speaker 1: on closer inspection, were tricks of perspective, the ordinary untidiness
Speaker 1: of growth and settlement in a public park. Only the ewes,
Speaker 1: a fountain, and perhaps this cluster of verns appeared consistently
Speaker 1: to thumb their noses at the city's ritual symmetry. At
Speaker 1: the park's western gate, under the gilded City crest, I
Speaker 1: found myself drawn toward the Historical Society a few short
Speaker 1: blocks away. I had known the current head archivist, Lorenzo
Speaker 1: for a decade by sight, an easy going, silver haired
Speaker 1: man whose resemblance to an amiable heron belied his passions
Speaker 1: for local records. He greeted me with a smile as
Speaker 1: I approached his stick spectacles, forging slightly from the abrupt
Speaker 1: shift between our doors, shell and the mosque of old
Speaker 1: paper back in search of lost flowers and zanella. I
Speaker 1: explain my hunt, careful to frame it as a study
Speaker 1: rather than an obsession. I'm looking for the oldest direct
Speaker 1: count's stories, legends, even rumors about the layout of the
Speaker 1: EU walks, anything at all about their number, the axis,
Speaker 1: or traditions. Lorenzo chuckled, shaking his head. Always the little
Speaker 1: things with you. God knows we historians get lost to
Speaker 1: murral scandalsy folks in misbehaving hedges. He led me to
Speaker 1: a battered file, thin with age. No major scandals there,
Speaker 1: I'm afraid some folks ons mostly invented. An eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: memore describes walking the unpaired path pondering love si exec
Speaker 1: that was always talk about the garden giving people's sense
Speaker 1: of playful imbalance, a space for the city to remember
Speaker 1: that order is a fiction and noble but artificial desire.
Speaker 1: He riffled through a packet of correspondence. I do you
Speaker 1: recall as a boy hearing older relatives insist that the
Speaker 1: garden had peculiar relutions, a tendency to repay mirrored on
Speaker 1: some days, lopsided on others, depending on the weather or remood.
Speaker 1: But even then it was anecdote, the kind of thing
Speaker 1: idelt say to amuse children. Nothing definitive, nothing to unsettle
Speaker 1: the dominant story. A woman from the society's researched out
Speaker 1: if Julia at a practical sort blund in her opinions,
Speaker 1: offered her to take as she arranged model dihramas by the
Speaker 1: society's main display. As far as I've ever known, nobody
Speaker 1: much cared for the extra u until the last century,
Speaker 1: when it became a minor civic point of pride. A
Speaker 1: little oddness keeps as humble, my grandmother used to say, frankly,
Speaker 1: I think someone needed a way to explain a planting air.
Speaker 1: I tried to press her. Would you call it a
Speaker 1: founder's one, she shrugged. If so, it's the most successful
Speaker 1: error ever made. The archival narrative has been consistent for
Speaker 1: as long as anyone's looked for it. I thanked them both,
Speaker 1: but left not answers, but with a strange sense of convergence.
Speaker 1: The further I pushed into the official story, the less
Speaker 1: resistance I found to the city's embrace of its unruliness.
Speaker 1: The anomaly was not just unresisted, it was beloved, a
Speaker 1: source of gentle joking, abad of the city's ry self awareness.
Speaker 1: Out in the sun, I circled the pox out of
Speaker 1: perimeter to the city plaza checkerboard of stone and water,
Speaker 1: known for hosting local festivals. I studied the lines of
Speaker 1: plane trees, the rhythm of benches, squinting for signs of
Speaker 1: other such spatial slippages. But here at least, geometry found
Speaker 1: itself respected everything matter, the old plans, each side echoing
Speaker 1: its partner. The disorder belonged to the garden alone. Singularity
Speaker 1: of it brought me back with her nude curiosity. There
Speaker 1: was no sense impressing a symptom that, however obvious, now
Speaker 1: had rooted itself deeper than documentation, woven into the city's personality,
Speaker 1: immune to every correct impulse. The next day, after another
Speaker 1: sleepless net pouring over my sketches and notes, I found
Speaker 1: myself frummaging through the possessions I had kept, not in
Speaker 1: the archives, but in my home. Things are trusted enough
Speaker 1: not to consign to official storage. At the bottom of
Speaker 1: a battered wardrobe bionette, one of my first work jackets,
Speaker 1: terribly patched at the elbows in the inside pocket tapped
Speaker 1: away beneath, Lynn lingered the old tool I used for
Speaker 1: measuring access distances, a chunk of softwood with notches cut
Speaker 1: precisely in pairs, a small pencil mark for each tree
Speaker 1: and its reflected companion. No odd numbers here. I tested
Speaker 1: the motion in my fingers, closing my eyes and rehearsing
Speaker 1: the ritual measure how my hands always searched for the
Speaker 1: match point. Never a singleton left without a mate. The
Speaker 1: body doesn't easily relinquish its choreography, and I realized with
Speaker 1: something like all that in the garden, I continued to
Speaker 1: move as if symmetry still rolled eve and as my
Speaker 1: eyes reported otherwise, the gestures persisted, pulling string taut, counting
Speaker 1: off steps, making each cut in such a way that
Speaker 1: the access de manded pairs. If the garden had changed,
Speaker 1: it had not sought my permission nor that of my
Speaker 1: teacher before me. One evening, compelled by a vague memory
Speaker 1: of Lonago garden conferences, I hunted down a fate a
Speaker 1: business card from a neuropsychologist acquaintance, Monica, who had occasionally
Speaker 1: consulted on a city project about parks and mental health.
Speaker 1: I called and explained my predicament as best I could.
Speaker 1: Hemmemriy habit and collective reculd seem to disagree on a
Speaker 1: mad er not of taste, but a fact. Monica it reserved,
Speaker 1: but always ready for au Hipotheses met me after work
Speaker 1: at a tea shop overlooking the river. Once I finished,
Speaker 1: she leaned her chin into her palm, regarding my story
Speaker 1: with both caution and a glint of professional curiosity. Memories
Speaker 1: and unreliable narrator Antonella. We reconstruct, we overlay emotion, expedition,
Speaker 1: even aspiration. The mind can fill gaps with whatever most
Speaker 1: fits our theory of the world. But she added its
Speaker 1: rare vanishing never for such gapsole line so exactly with
Speaker 1: the loss or replacement of a physical thing. If the
Speaker 1: garden are changed, you'd expect to find some one somewhere
Speaker 1: who had noticed in real time. I nodded, feeling both
Speaker 1: validated and gently rebuffed. Your private documents, though interesting that
Speaker 1: they don't shift with the consensus. Isolated records can be lost, forge,
Speaker 1: or divergent by accident. But the volume you describe as peculiar.
Speaker 1: Why I would astro ask only asteriscure notebooks and physical
Speaker 1: tools remember symmetry when everything else does not. She offered
Speaker 1: no answers, but left me with a phrase I could
Speaker 1: not shake. Ritual is a form of repeated inscriptions, sometimes
Speaker 1: on the body, sometimes on the world. One can lose
Speaker 1: track of which side is the author. That night, I
Speaker 1: practiced walking the axis again in my living room, humming
Speaker 1: the familiar pattern, I tried a new experiment. Instead of
Speaker 1: remembering visually, I let my arms repeat the measures I'd
Speaker 1: used for years, letting the rhythm override conscious recal. My
Speaker 1: hands settled time after time on movements that required an
Speaker 1: even paired alignment. Line step, paws cut, again and again.
Speaker 1: The choreography insisted on balance and visible to my conscious mind.
Speaker 1: Coultacity's habits repeated so faithfully. Anker a version of reality
Speaker 1: at odds with itself, one in which rich will survive
Speaker 1: long in the hands and tolls long after eyes and
Speaker 1: photographs moved on. The more I considered, the more appealing
Speaker 1: the thought became. The continuities sometimes maintained as a kind
Speaker 1: of intangible pattern flowing just below the visible. With curiosity
Speaker 1: now taking me not only backward but laterally, I hunted
Speaker 1: for even older traces, evidence from before the age of
Speaker 1: easy photography, moment where the symmetry might have been attested
Speaker 1: or doubted. There were rumors of a lost painting, one
Speaker 1: the town's founders allegedly commissioned to illustrate their ambitions for
Speaker 1: regarding of mathematical harmony. No one I met had seen
Speaker 1: it in the flesh, but references persisted. In eighteenth century
Speaker 1: Travelerd mentioned a spectacular mirrored park whose image had gone
Speaker 1: missing from the ark of volumes centuries ago. I trailed
Speaker 1: the lead to the city's art museum, where an accommodating
Speaker 1: curator introduced me to Alvira, a local art historian with
Speaker 1: a practical manner and a skeptical barer. We pulled up
Speaker 1: period plans and travel accounts. Paging through brittle volumes of
Speaker 1: traveler's remarks, Alvira gave me a considering look as we
Speaker 1: leave for a translation of a visitor seventeen sixty four diary.
Speaker 1: He know that the park's dimensions don't fit the typical
Speaker 1: golden ratio common to run Nissant's design, but rather a
Speaker 1: much rare proportional system attributed to Battina's follows as controversial,
Speaker 1: only used in a handful of gardens elsewhere, some believe
Speaker 1: it can provoke a subtle sense of disorientation, a pleasant unbalancing,
Speaker 1: she pointed a diagram rendered in CPNC. Even the current
Speaker 1: asymmetry preserves ease underlign dimensions. Perhaps the word has shifted,
Speaker 1: but how the ratios, the feel of movement through the
Speaker 1: garden remains constant. I glimpse something thrilling in her words,
Speaker 1: No matter how the surface features that the garden had changed,
Speaker 1: Perhaps what truly mattered was the propituration of a certain
Speaker 1: asteris type asterisk of experience, a through line more powerful
Speaker 1: than individual numbers or alignments. A Vira reference to curious
Speaker 1: local legends she come across in a nineteenth century city newspaper,
Speaker 1: yellowed increased with age. After a festival celebrating the buzentenuyear
Speaker 1: the garden in the early eighteen hundreds, dance people claimed
Speaker 1: that symmetry walked away to her words, attributed half jokingly
Speaker 1: to a wine fueled bout of for shaping. No physical
Speaker 1: evidence survived, only the phrase repeated enough times that it
Speaker 1: into the park's foot memory. As we stood looking at
Speaker 1: a cleverly reconstructed digital panoram of the park made from
Speaker 1: a mistake of prephotographic sketches, she explained her own position.
Speaker 1: Landscapes are alive not because they grow leaves and branches,
Speaker 1: but because they are products of continual human negotiation. Perhaps
Speaker 1: the garden is less a fixed place than a shifting
Speaker 1: temper to what you see depends on how you want
Speaker 1: to see it, how the city needs to remember itself.
Speaker 1: The pattern of saories, plans, and habits began to overlap,
Speaker 1: if only faintly. Symmetry is an ideal, A symmetry is
Speaker 1: a fact, but always at rue a kind of unbroken experience.
Speaker 1: The walk itself, the movement of body in heart through
Speaker 1: ordered rows, whether or not their numbers matched some platonic vision,
Speaker 1: I found myself wondering whether what survived in gardens, in
Speaker 1: landscapes at all was less italy of physical features and
Speaker 1: more the gravitational pull of intention ritual, a kind of
Speaker 1: undoing rehearsal. What if in all our tending, perceiving, and recording,
Speaker 1: we kept not the garden but the probability of the garden.
Speaker 1: The notion carried me into a slow meditation. That evening,
Speaker 1: I bundled up in an old gardener's cooked one of mine,
Speaker 1: with smears of wax and old pollen, costed at the cuffs,
Speaker 1: and returned to the yew walk. I let my note
Speaker 1: regress and open beside me undermentioned. For several hours, simply
Speaker 1: watched the light shift across the gravel, the gradual procession
Speaker 1: of strollers, lovers, and old men with dogs slipping into
Speaker 1: a half of notice. I remembered all the exit to
Speaker 1: which the axis had been believed into existence, my own
Speaker 1: daily walks with pruning shears, instructing of apprentices, the click
Speaker 1: of the survey's string, talk between two trunks, each was
Speaker 1: in its alf a negotiation, a quiet argument with the garden,
Speaker 1: setting forth an order that was both desired and enforced,
Speaker 1: and it was never fully mine. I had always felt
Speaker 1: the gardens subtle, pushed back, the way certain use thick
Speaker 1: and naturally, the way roots chafed against paths, The way
Speaker 1: every attempt at straight edge over years would be inexorably
Speaker 1: softened by time's hand. Order was a contract, not a commandment,
Speaker 1: The thought comforted me. Now the garden, far from being
Speaker 1: a battleground between my memories in the cities, became a
Speaker 1: shared reno, striving every generation, from the founder to Lucia
Speaker 1: to Emil, wrestling with the desire for symmetry and the
Speaker 1: pleasure of living in its failure. A gentle frill gathered
Speaker 1: in my chest. Perhaps it was not that the world
Speaker 1: had a change and I had failed to notice, but
Speaker 1: rather that we, all of us, in different areas the
Speaker 1: midst tussled with possibility, and the rescue of our collective tending, naming,
Speaker 1: and loving made the world resiliently, even beautifully ambigorous. I lingered,
Speaker 1: waiting for Lucia's rounds, fagging her down as she bustled
Speaker 1: past with her usual brisk, affectionate energy. Lucia, if you
Speaker 1: had your way, would you return the access to perfect symmetry?
Speaker 1: She grinned, pushing her hat back on her head. I've
Speaker 1: been asked that before. Tourists hop on the odd numbers,
Speaker 1: you know, but I love the oddness to prune for
Speaker 1: symmetry is beautiful, yes, yes, but someone has to keep
Speaker 1: the character alive. The city is far too expert at
Speaker 1: sounding down its edges. Besides, as she spread her hands
Speaker 1: encompassing the slight lot of the yu walk, this is ours.
Speaker 1: Any One can plant a match set, but it takes
Speaker 1: real courage to keep the extras a sign of belonging.
Speaker 1: I found myself laughing, not at her sentiment, but at
Speaker 1: the untide, not in my thinking. Maybe in the beginning
Speaker 1: we simply made a mistake, one lost tree, one extra planted.
Speaker 1: Then through the dangerous magic of her telling, we turned
Speaker 1: it into a custom, a civic legend, a geometry uniquely
Speaker 1: nova stations. What started is error, or as an inconsequential
Speaker 1: wedge of rue overtime, became principal intention tradition. Sitting later
Speaker 1: with my old diagrams, I felt the solitude more tenderly
Speaker 1: than before. Of course, my private records remembered the old bands.
Speaker 1: Who was there, after all to dispute me when my
Speaker 1: job was persuading the garden to accept order. But it
Speaker 1: was only in the isolating quiet of a storage unit,
Speaker 1: and touched by all the careless retellings, that their version persisted.
Speaker 1: The world as lived in Retoll had gently shifted. My
Speaker 1: documents walled off from thus steady pressure retained a sense
Speaker 1: of what might have been, rather than what endured. The
Speaker 1: realization left me not frustrated, but exhilarated, Released from the
Speaker 1: obligation to impose one perfect dancer on a place so saturated,
Speaker 1: which shared attention and laid longing in the park beneath
Speaker 1: the slanted spring sunlight. I let this feeling settle. The
Speaker 1: garden was not wrong, nor quite right. It was a
Speaker 1: palimpsist marked in revised It flucks a measure of ocesils
Speaker 1: for rehearsal city's patient labor to see Missy remember, I
Speaker 1: must remember just enough to keep its cherished differences alive.
Speaker 1: The next weeks, thus pulled beneath the Ewes and at Powell,
Speaker 1: near the cafete heiras he looked both frailer and more alert,
Speaker 1: as if the last visit had stirred something essential but
Speaker 1: fragile inside, I laughed, Shall we compare notes on which
Speaker 1: gardon we remember this time, he smiled, proffering a worn
Speaker 1: hand drawn mapper of his own, one with twel views
Speaker 1: on each side, all lines tight and bold. This one
Speaker 1: was truer once, he said, but it doesn't bother me anymore.
Speaker 1: I like the crookedness. In the end. It means you
Speaker 1: can always find the odd you in the crowd. We
Speaker 1: sat in companionable quiet, trading stories half remembered prunine days,
Speaker 1: some baked afternoons, small and specific details about gardens that
Speaker 1: might never have existed exactly as we recalled. It was
Speaker 1: a relief to discover we didn't need to agree or
Speaker 1: two fix the contradiction. The park wasn't something to be solved.
Speaker 1: It was something to be shure, half made in the remembering.
Speaker 1: As the lights came gently up along the gravel walks,
Speaker 1: I found myself unexpectedly content, a weight gone from my shoulders.
Speaker 1: I knew now that the garden would never be finished,
Speaker 1: would never quite settle into a single form, and that
Speaker 1: this was not a failure, but the deepest mark of
Speaker 1: it belonging to us. In a last gesture before heading home,
Speaker 1: I let my fingers trace the rough old bark of
Speaker 1: that extra U twelve on the left now, as a
Speaker 1: yielding as any other fact in the world, and as
Speaker 1: soft with possibility as a freshly turned bed. The colors
Speaker 1: of the wood granded me above the sparrows chattered their
Speaker 1: tiny arguments as lively as ever. For all our plans
Speaker 1: and blueprints, how many venerable landscapes have quietly recorded not
Speaker 1: only the passage of years, but the sum of all
Speaker 1: our hopes, our intentions, how we wished a world might
Speaker 1: be seen. I left the garden while the birds still
Speaker 1: sang and the city's lamps winked on, holding one last
Speaker 1: darting question to myself, how would I even know if
Speaker 1: the world changed unless I had been watching closely enough
Speaker 1: to catch what it was before. The path home win
Speaker 1: through streets both old and changed, humming with the music
Speaker 1: of an ordinary evening life and its mysteries, both continuing
Speaker 1: with out crowded witness. And that is the aunt. Thank
Speaker 1: you for listening, and I will see you in the
Speaker 1: next one.