The Man and the Garden | A Peaceful Story About Healing and Solitude

A story about healing and solitude by Dave Hibbins

In the quiet town of Sa Kaeo, not far from the Cambodian border, there lived a man named Arun who no longer smiled.

He had once been known across the village for his kindness. Children used to run past his gate every afternoon, dropping their sandals as they sprinted into his garden—three rai of mango trees, soft dirt paths, a little koi pond with water so clear you could see the clouds in it. The old people called it sacred land. The children just called it magic.

Arun would sit on his wooden bench with a cold bottle of green tea and laugh when they picked his tamarinds too early.

“Sour makes you strong,” he’d say, waving them off.

But that was before. Before the loss. Before the silence. Before the gates were closed.

No one in the village asked what had happened, not directly. But they all knew. When Arun’s wife passed from illness, and their only son left for Bangkok and never wrote, something inside the man broke—quietly, like a roof beam giving way in the night.

One day, without a word, Arun put up a sign at the front of his garden.

ห้ามเข้า – No Entry. Private.

He locked the gate, sold the koi fish, and let the weeds come.

The laughter disappeared like mist.

Children still passed by the lane, but they looked away now. They spoke in whispers when they talked of the garden at the end of the road.

“I heard there’s a spirit there now,” one girl said.

“He used to give us ice cream,” another boy murmured. “Before he turned into a ghost.”

Arun stayed inside.

The birds stopped coming.

The mango trees forgot to bloom.

Even the breeze that once carried temple music from the next village over seemed to avoid his land now. The air was still. Not peaceful—just paused, like it was waiting for something.

The First Return

On the hottest day of the year, just before the rice planting festival, Arun woke to the sound of something he hadn’t heard in years:

Laughter.

Light, scattered, like marbles bouncing across a tiled floor.

He sat up slowly, joints aching, and shuffled to the window.

There, at the far edge of his garden—beyond the weeds and the cracked fishpond—stood a child.

A little girl, barefoot and wild-haired, spinning in slow circles under the shade of a mango tree. Where she stood, the ground was strangely green—soft with tiny new grass, even though it hadn’t rained in weeks.

Arun blinked. Was it a dream? A trick of the heat?

Then the girl stopped and looked directly at him, as if she’d known all along he was watching.

And she smiled.

Arun didn’t open the window. He simply stood behind the curtain, watching.

The girl couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Her shirt was oversized, faded with a cartoon dolphin smiling across the front. Her legs were dusted in red dirt. One hand clutched a yellow plastic bucket. The other trailed lazily through the tall grass as she walked toward the tree.

He hadn’t opened that gate in years. Not once. Yet somehow she was inside.

Arun’s heart beat faster—not from anger, not exactly, but from a kind of nervousness he didn’t recognize. He hadn’t spoken to a child in so long. He hadn’t wanted to.

He put on his old sandals and stepped out the door.

She didn’t run.

That’s what startled him most.

She looked up from beneath the tree, squinting in the sunlight, then lifted the bucket and tilted it toward him. Inside was water and a handful of soft yellow petals. Frangipani.

“I’m making perfume,” she said, as if they’d already been talking.

Arun stood still, frowning.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said at last, voice hoarse from disuse.

“Why not?” she asked, blinking. “It’s pretty.”

“It’s not for playing. This is my land.”

She nodded slowly, as if considering that. “But you’re not using it.”

Her words hit like a small stone. Not thrown to hurt—but true, and impossible to ignore.

He looked around.

The mango tree nearest them, the one she had danced under, had new buds forming on its branches. Fresh, pale green. He hadn’t seen a bud on that tree in nearly four years.

The weeds near the pond had parted, as if trimmed by invisible shears. The old swing that used to hang from the big tree still dangled by one rope—yet it no longer looked broken. Just waiting.

“What’s your name?” he asked, quieter now.

“Dao,” she said. “Like the star.”

“And your family?”

She pointed vaguely toward the back of the lane. “Mama cleans the school. We just moved.”

He nodded, then took a breath. “Well… Dao, this garden is closed. You’ll have to go.”

She looked up at him—not angry, not sad. Just curious.

“But what if it wants to be open again?”

That night, Arun didn’t sleep.

He sat on his porch, watching the same tree she’d sat under. He could swear it looked taller. Stronger. The grass around it had softened. Somewhere in the dark, a nightbird called once—then again.

He hadn’t heard birdsong in this garden in a long time.

The Gate Stays Open

The next day, she came again.

He didn’t stop her.

This time she brought a boy, maybe her older brother. The two of them played quietly, collecting fallen leaves and floating them in a rusty bucket half-full of water.

Arun watched from inside. He poured himself a cup of tea and drank it slowly. Then he refilled the kettle. He poured a second cup.

And placed it on the step.

The third day, there were five children.

On the fourth, eight.

One climbed the fence. One wriggled through the bushes. The little girl Dao just walked in like she belonged—which, somehow, she did.

By the end of the week, the laughter had returned. So had the butterflies. So had the breeze.

And so, quietly, did Arun.

He didn’t make announcements. He didn’t take down the sign.

But he opened the gate.

And left it that way.

The Boy Beneath the Tree

Years passed, as they always do, like sunlight across a wooden floor—slow, soft, and certain.

Arun’s hair turned the color of ashes. His hands curled at the joints, no longer strong enough to lift tools, but still gentle enough to shell tamarinds or peel a mango for the little ones who still called him Lung.

He didn’t sweep much anymore. Didn’t fix fences or climb ladders.

But each morning, he sat on the same wooden bench beneath the frangipani tree, holding a thermos of tea and watching the garden he once locked away come to life again—full of laughter, petals, and promise.

One morning in December, just as the breeze turned dry and the leaves began their slow golden fall, Arun woke earlier than usual.

He felt something in the air. A stillness—but not the old kind. Not the lonely kind. A kind of waiting.

He dressed slowly, folded his scarf over his shoulder, and stepped barefoot onto the porch.

The garden was quiet.

No children yet. No birdsong.

But in the farthest corner—beneath the smallest tree—someone stood.

It was the boy.

The one from years ago. The one with no name.

He stood barefoot in the same spot, arms by his sides, face turned toward the tree. The morning light made his shirt glow pale gold. His hands were still stained red. So were his feet.

Arun’s breath caught.

He walked slowly, not out of fear, but reverence. His knees ached with every step. His heart, strangely, did not.

When he came near, the boy turned to him.

Up close, he looked exactly as Arun remembered—small, still, impossibly calm. His eyes were deep and dark, like temple shadows just before dawn.

Arun stopped. Voice low.

“Where did you go?”

The boy tilted his head, smiling. “You let me play once in your garden.”

Arun nodded, swallowing the tightness in his throat. “I remember.”

The boy stepped forward and touched his hand.

It was warm. Steady. Like touching sunlight.

“Today,” the boy said, “you’ll come with me to mine.”

And then Arun saw the tree.

The one in the farthest corner. The one that had always been smallest. Weakest.

It was covered now in white blossoms—so many they weighed the branches down like snow. Golden fruit hung from its limbs, and the grass below sparkled with dew, though it hadn’t rained in weeks.

The birds were gathered in its branches, silent but watching.

Dao’s drawing flashed through his mind.

Stars in place of trees.

He looked back at the boy.

And in that moment, Arun understood.

Not everything. But enough.

He smiled.

Tears slid down his cheeks—not from sadness, but from something deeper.

Gratitude. Release.

When the children came that afternoon, they found the garden just as it had been. Bright. Breezy. Alive.

They ran to their usual places—some to the swing, some to the pond, some to the patch of shade near the fence.

Dao walked quietly to the old wooden bench beneath the frangipani tree.

There, seated like always, was Arun.

His eyes were closed.

His face, peaceful.

In his lap rested a small yellow bucket filled with frangipani petals.

And overhead, in the farthest corner of the garden, the smallest tree bloomed white as a wedding dress, glowing beneath the afternoon sun.

And no one built a wall there again.

Thank you so much for reading my short story about healing and solitude and a path I have walked.