For the first few months after I moved in, I could not understand my next-door neighbor's garden. Every other yard on the street was trimmed, the hedges cut into straight lines, the grass mowed in tidy rows. Hers looked wild — flowers growing wherever they pleased, tall grass brushing against the fence, vines climbing in every direction.
I assumed she simply did not care, and honestly, I judged her for it. One evening I saw her kneeling among the flowers, running her hands slowly over the leaves rather than looking at them, and I realized something was different. It was only later, from another neighbor, that I learned she had lost her sight almost a decade earlier.
Curious and more than a little ashamed of my earlier judgment, I introduced myself properly the following weekend. She laughed warmly when I admitted that I had assumed the garden was neglected. "I don't grow it to look a certain way," she explained. "I grow it to smell and feel a certain way." She walked me through the yard, naming each plant by its scent — mint here, jasmine there, roses further along the fence — arranging them not for how they would appear from the street but for how they would unfold to someone who could only touch and smell them.
What had looked careless to me was, in fact, carefully planned around senses I rarely thought to rely on. I had judged an entire garden by a single sense, forgetting that the person who built it was not seeing it the same way I was.
I still cut my own grass in straight lines, out of habit more than anything else. But I never again assume that something looks wrong just because it is not what I expected to see.