Sometimes, I think we would never see mom if we had a bigger garden or a lot of cultivated hectares. In the backyard, there is no such space. Many years ago, the land used to be more fertile than it is now. We have two gardens. For the most part, mom sets up flower pots that look more original than the photos she admires in magazines. Of the things from dad that we can still find in the attic, a few seem to have life. As an act of goodness, mom has given them a less sad ending than they previously had. Safety helmets with signs of being scorched by solder, or new ones that dad probably never got out of his packaging. Some hang in front of the dining room. Blues and whites. Others are in front of one of the smaller windows in the room. They hang from ropes with extremely complex knots. Mom boasts that she handles them wonderfully, a method she learned on the internet. Occasionally, she speaks to herself aloud, as if she is passing the knowledge on to someone else. She does it to speed up her memory. I see myself with sixty years of practicing the same exercise, but with another hobby in those moments.