It was a lesson I never expected to learn from something so small. Those fragile, shining beads held a quiet, relentless hunger that would never care how long I’d tended each leaf. They were not monsters, just life doing what life does—but in the wrong place, at the wrong time, aimed straight at everything I loved in that soil.
Scooping them out felt like choosing sides. I wasn’t angry, just oddly humbled, aware that my idea of “peaceful garden” had always left out the constant negotiations happening beneath the surface. Since that day, I still kneel in the dirt with the same reverence, but now I look twice at anything that seems too perfect. Beauty is welcome here, but it no longer gets a free pass. I protect what I grow, even when the threat arrives disguised as a handful of harmless pearls.
