River's second day of garden education began with Flora leading him to a wooden structure behind her farm that he had assumed was a storage shed. When she opened the door, the smell hit him immediately - rich, earthy, and slightly sweet, like the forest floor after rain.
"Welcome to the compost cathedral," Flora announced with mock ceremony. "This is where the magic happens."
River peered into the wooden bins filled with layers of decomposing vegetables, fallen leaves, and what looked like kitchen scraps. "It smells like..."
"Death and rebirth," Flora finished cheerfully. "The most beautiful cycle in nature."
She handed him a pitchfork and began turning one of the piles. "Everything that dies feeds something else. These potato peels will become soil that grows new potatoes. These apple cores will nourish apple trees. Nothing is ever really wasted if you understand the cycle."
River thought about his Seoul restaurant's dumpster, filled every night with food scraps that were hauled away to some distant landfill. All that potential life, thrown away because he had never learned to see decay as transformation.
"Your grandmother was the one who taught me about composting," Flora said, working the pitchfork through the rich, dark soil at the bottom of the bin. "She said it was like cooking - you need the right ingredients in the right proportions, and then you have to be patient while time does its work."
"How long does it take?"
"Six months to a year for really good compost. You can't rush it, can't control it completely. You just create the right conditions and trust the process."
River knelt down and picked up a handful of the finished compost. It was dark and crumbly, smelling of earth and rain and growing things. "This used to be garbage?"
"This used to be dinner scraps and yard waste. Now it's black gold - the best fertilizer you can give a plant."
They spent the morning turning compost piles and learning about the delicate balance of green materials (nitrogen-rich vegetable scraps) and brown materials (carbon-rich leaves and paper). Flora explained how the right mixture would heat up as it decomposed, how too much nitrogen would make it smell bad, how too much carbon would make it decompose too slowly.
"It's like any relationship," she said, adding dried leaves to a pile that was getting too wet. "You need balance, patience, and the willingness to accept that some things have to break down before they can become something new."
River found himself thinking about his own life. How many things had he been trying to preserve in perfect condition instead of letting them transform into something better?
After lunch - another simple meal of rice and vegetables that tasted like it had been grown with love - Flora announced it was time for the afternoon lesson: seed starting.
"It's getting late in the season for most things," she said, leading him to her small greenhouse. "But we can start some cold-weather crops for winter harvesting."
The greenhouse was warm and humid, filled with trays of seedlings in various stages of growth. Tiny green shoots pushing up through dark soil, reaching toward the filtered sunlight.
"This is where it all begins," Flora said softly. "Every plant starts as potential energy wrapped in a small package."
She showed him how to fill seed trays with a mixture of compost and soil, how to plant seeds at the right depth, how to water them gently so as not to disturb their delicate beginnings.
"The hardest part," Flora said, watching River carefully place spinach seeds in their small holes, "is trusting that something so small can become something so magnificent."
River thought about his own journey - how he had started as a boy who loved cooking with his grandmother, grown into something complicated and artificial, and was now trying to find his way back to something simple and true.
"Flora," he said, covering the seeds with a thin layer of soil, "do you ever regret leaving your old life?"
Flora was quiet for a moment, misting a tray of newly planted lettuce seeds. "Sometimes I miss the security. The steady paycheck, the clear expectations. But I never miss the feeling of being disconnected from my own life."
"What do you mean?"
"In my office job, I felt like I was watching someone else live my days. Getting up, going through the motions, coming home exhausted from doing work that didn't mean anything to me." Flora set down her spray bottle. "Here, even on the hardest days, I feel like I'm actually alive."
River nodded. He understood that feeling of watching someone else live your life.
"Do you think it's possible to go back?" he asked. "To who you used to be before everything got complicated?"
"I don't think you can go back," Flora said thoughtfully. "But I think you can go forward to something better. Like composting - you don't get back the original apple core, but you get something richer."
That evening, River sat in his grandmother's kitchen with her old recipe notebook open in front of him. But instead of reading the recipes, he was writing in the margins - notes about what he had learned that day. The patience required for compost. The faith needed for seeds. The balance necessary for growth.
His phone, which he had been ignoring for two days, buzzed with another urgent message from his business partner. River looked at it briefly, then set it aside. The crises that had seemed so important in Seoul felt like problems from another planet.
Outside the kitchen window, his grandmother's garden was settling into evening. The plants Flora had helped him weed that morning looked somehow more purposeful, more alive. Tomorrow they would continue learning - maybe transplanting seedlings, or harvesting vegetables for Flora's market customers.
River realized he was looking forward to tomorrow with an anticipation he hadn't felt in years. Not the anxious anticipation of performance and judgment, but the simple pleasure of learning something new about how life actually worked.
How things grew. How to tend them properly. How to help them become what they were meant to be.
For the first time since leaving Seoul, River felt like he might be growing too.