Each morning
I find her in the little garden behind the house— green onions,
chives,
four tomato plants
holding their small red suns
in quiet rows.

She moves among them as though following
an ancient music
she never learned to name.

Old habits die hard,
they say— but some habits do not die at all.

They cross the years like a hidden river,
from a mother’s hands into a daughter’s hands,
from dawn into another dawn.

For more than seven decades
she has carried what she never knew
she was carrying: the early rising,
the faithful tending,
the quiet walking into morning, the mother’s rhythm written not in books
but in the body.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing grand. Only the old mystery: the body remembers what the mind has forgotten, the hands repeat what the heart received
before language had given it a name.

I watch her moving through the garden, and suddenly the morning seems older than either of us. A mother walks again in her footsteps. A vanished kitchen opens its door.

A childhood dawn returns without a sound. This is how a mother’s line travels through time— not as a banner,
not as a monument, but as a root descending quietly into the dark, still reaching for the soil it first loved.

And what is love
if not this— something handed down without command, something remembered without memory, something living after the one who first gave it has become silence?

She bends to the little garden. The onions rise. The chives breathe. The tomatoes gather their small light.

And I stand watching,
knowing that somewhere beneath this morning another mother is still walking, still tending, still loving—

without ceasing.