On things not readily apparent

maybe there is something truly magical in the mundane

I’m wondering if not tending to this garden isn’t so different from not tending to my marriage.

I’m standing out in my tiny front yard flower garden with my coffee cup. It’s still early on Saturday morning, too early for any cars to be passing by, too early for the clearing clouds to part and expose the sun loitering at the base of the maple trees. The air is thick from days of on-and-off rain and the Adirondack chairs are wet in places, with little puddles on the back slats of the seat.

“We need a towel,” I say to my spouse Janyce who is walking toward me from the open garage holding her cup. She stops in the driveway and looks at me, shakes her head and walks back. I’m studying the bees that are hovering over the yellow primrose. The garden is lush and fragrant, bursting with color and texture this year, the flowers overcrowded and overlapping.

Janyce walks past me, sets her cup down on the metal table in the center and wipes the green chair dry.

“Shh, look over there,” she says, pointing.

We both see the baby bunny hop out from under the ornamental pine where there is a nest every year. This lone tiny rabbit is getting bolder and plumper every day. We quietly watch it stand up on its hind legs to pull leaves off one of my perennials and munch away. Eventually we both sit down, and resume talking and drinking coffee.

“I had a dream that we lived apart from each other long distance and I was asking you to be spontaneous and stay longer and you wouldn’t,” I say. “So I got mad at you and told you to not to bother coming until Friday.”

“Oh yeah? Do you think I’m not spontaneous anymore?” she says.

“Well, you are certainly happy as a clam lately entrenched in your work routines.”

“You know my job is not like yours,” she says. “I have more deadlines, and less flexibility.”

“Yes, I know.”

Last night, Janyce and I spent another Friday night sitting side-by-side on the couch in the dark eating a roast beef roll-up sandwich and crunching red pepper slices while watching our favorite crime show.

“Want to see what’s up with Torhildur?” she said to me, while we were standing in the kitchen at the end of the work day trying to figure out what we were going to to do for the start of the weekend.

“Murder my durder?” I said.

It’s a running joke with us that we’re both equally addicted to crime shows with local color and local accents. We no sooner finished binge watching Mare of Easttown with its heavily spoofed Pennsylvania dialect when we found an even better series called Trapped with iconic characters who drink endless cups of coffee and wrap themselves in wool scarfs and hand-knit sweaters. We love to listen to the Nordic/German sounding Icelandic language while reading the English subtitles.

I kept slapping her leg and exclaiming out loud every time the action was punctuated with a slow pan of the stark countryside of green fields dotted with white sheep and framed by boxy white houses with red roofs perfectly situated at the edge of looming snow-topped mountains.

“Doesn’t it remind you of our honeymoon in Scotland a little?” I said.

“It does.” she said.

“I’m going to make another cup of tea. Can you pause it for a bit?” I said.

I lingered at the kitchen window while waiting for the water to boil, watching the hummingbird resting on the side of the feeder, just looking around. This year, the honey bees arrived at the catmint first— just honey bees— and after only a few days they were gone as suddenly as they arrived, replaced by the bumble bees who crawl over the same blooms day after day in a circular frenzy. The resident snake is getting thick in the middle, poking her head under the piles of leaf debris to uncover spiders and beetles, nodding her head and opening her mouth wide. The chipmunk sits triumphantly on the arm of the Adirondack chair now to crack open a recently unburied hickory nut, and a goldfinch pair flits back and forth on the salvia. I watch them work together to pull out one long dried piece from last season, the old shoots that I never bothered to clear away fully, and carry it away with them sideways, bobbing up and down on their halting flight back into the trees.

This whole season I have been meaning to clear out the dead leaves that have settled under the bushes. I keep meaning to trim back the overgrowth, pull out the weedy lanky clover, dig around the contours of the garden edge with my tools and add new mulch. But I haven’t. For some reason, I haven’t really felt like tending to my garden at all. Instead I’m just noticing what is going on, just watching. I’m wondering if not tending to this garden isn’t so different from not tending to my marriage. You always hear that you have to work at a garden. Prune this, fuss with that, move another thing out of the way. But sometimes I think it’s also fine to just leave things alone and simply appreciate all that’s right there.

“Hey, you ready?” said Janyce. “Torhildur just set up a meeting with the murderer.”

I grabbed my cup and shut off the light in the kitchen.

“On my way.” I said.