BLOOMINGTON - In 30 years, the Sweeneys never parked a car in their one-car garage. The cracked, oil-stained floor was lined with half-empty paint cans, a tangle of tools and lumpy bags of fertilizer.

But then JoAnn Sweeney needed something to do. Steve, her husband of 36 years, was recovering from lung cancer. Their five children were grown and she retired after 28 years with the Centrillio Council of Girl Scouts.

Steve was the gardener. He was the one who lined the driveway with hostas and coaxed the ivy to climb along their neat two-story home. She was the one who mistakenly pulled the fern-like goatsbeard, thinking it was a weed.

But now she'd handle the gardening chores and she thought she could use a potting place. The garage wasn't being used. She pulled off a piece of drywall and one thing led to another.

"I needed something to do," she said.

Their youngest, Casey, helped her claw through the dirty drywall and pull out each crooked nail. It gave her something else to think about.

And she kept thinking. After a new concrete floor was poured, her husband said, "Now we can park a car in there."

She told him, "We've gotten along fine without a garage for 30 years."

And besides, you couldn't park a car over a rose-covered area rug centered under a white ceiling fan.

Shelves held ceramic teapots, an artfully placed pair of red gardening gloves and a crocheted doily from a friend who died.

It's hardly a place for a lawnmower, not with a pair of wicker chairs plumped by smooth pillows and divided by a 6-foot window hanging from the ceiling, a window from Steve's childhood farmhouse.

A wooden screen decoupaged with girl-pink roses hides a cluster of tools, their long handles painted white and stuck with rose appliqués.

"Steve said, 'You're not decorating the tools,' and I said, 'I am.' "

The "room," as she calls it, has become a retreat, a place to go when she needs to get away from house noises, the hum of the refrigerator, the canned laughter from a sitcom, the hiss of an oxygen tank.

"Out here, you get to hear all the noises of the earth and it's so much more peaceful," she said, leaning down to tell Jake Sweeney, her 4-year-old grandson, they'd look for leaves in a few minutes. "It's quiet out here, a different kind of quiet."

When she's in her room, the phone goes unanswered. Her children have suggested she take a cell phone with her but she shakes her head.

"Why?" she asked, with a little laugh. "I can hear it ring. I just don't go in and answer it."

Sometimes she'll go out there with a too-hot cup of tea, pick up a magazine and find a crumpled leaf Jake placed there. Other times, she'll spot a limp flower he picked for her. And sticks, he always leaves sticks.

"I have so many sticks because he always says he's going to build me a castle."

But she has her castle, a simple garage with double barn-like doors painted the color of hot chocolate. A place where she can hear the wind pick up the leaves littering the driveway, feel the November chill, maybe even spot the first snowflakes.

"It's a work in progress," she said, poking at pots of coleus and ornamental kale on her potting bench. She plans to plant them, digging them out of the frozen earth in time for a Thanksgiving centerpiece.

"This was my therapy," she said, looking around the room that holds her husband's bulb and seed box, along with a neat stack of his gardening books. "The books are here because I need to learn what to do now. I don't want all his work to go to waste."

But Steve said that won't happen. Come spring, he hopes to resume some of his gardening chores. But he'll be competing with more than creeping Charlie. "I may have to fight her to take the yard back," he said.

As for reclaiming the garage, he won't fight that battle.

"Apparently," he said with a laugh, "it's hers."