I’ve always wanted to be a famous writer, not prolific like John Grisham, but rather famously obscure, like J.D. Salinger, only with less baggage and regrets. Being famous seems like a lot of trouble. Fortunately, like most people, I’m famously not famous, not unlike another writer, Flora Macdonald Mayor, who wrote The Rector’s Daughter 100 years ago. Mayor writes about familiar settings with a gentle satire. She writes of the climate, “Still, being damp, it was bound to have certain charms; the trunks were mossy, and the walls moldy.” And this description of the family’s drawing-room, furnished and appointed like “a kind of temple dedicated to boredom.” It is this quotidian boredom that fascinates me, since we live in a time and culture that celebrates anything but. Which brings me to the strange idea of watching a garden grow each day. 

Karen and I have taken to sitting each morning in the upper garden as we like to call it.

We are surrounded by crimson lilies and yellow petunias, purple coneflowers and orange marigolds, chives and thyme and basil and mint, along with peppers, tomatoes and elegant garlic scapes. 

My favorites are the daisies. Like shy wallflowers carrying veiled secrets at a boisterous dance, the daisies stand rigid and upright in the center of Karen’s garden. The promise of beauty is hidden for now by miniature domes, the protective sepals enclosing the delicate petals. But the grip is loosening and the petals are peeking out through the gaps. It is a slow and graceful dance that we enjoy each morning.

I sit rocking on the porch, looking east at a grove of trees just beyond the pond, awaiting sunrise like a faithful rooster, surrounded by the succulent and aromatic and graceful. We drink our coffee, holding our mugs like old friends that we don’t want to let go of, as the sun dutifully rises over the great canopy of the Hackberry tree.

Karen dead-heads her annuals, “her babies”, as she calls them. “I wonder what it feels like to retire,” I say out loud. How bored will I be? So I retire in tiny moments, here in the morning garden with Karen, assessing our day which we will stack up onto the cordwood of our accumulated memories when the sun sets this evening.

The day is upon us and restlessly, we are dead-heading our lives of its detritus so joy will flower into another day. This then is the gift of the morning that reveals itself to us when we are quiet and still and paying attention.

The gift of habit, of mindlessly dead-heading flowers and the repetition of inside jokes, and the summation of the prior days events, is our place of habitual connection. This may not seem romantic, but it is nonetheless, as beautiful as the morning chorus of the warblers and finches floating across the treetops.

This is the thing they didn’t tell me on my wedding day. That when the angels stop singing, the birds keep warbling. That sitting in a garden would become one of my favorite things, like raindrops on roses, and her affections would become mine, and to some degree, mine hers. We barely knew all the grace and tact required to come to this garden of constant death and life, withering and blooming, sorrow and joy. Far from being bleak, this freshening awareness transforms the repetition of everyday love and companionship into solemn wonder.

Every day is a gift, a life shared that began with the seed of a promise to live side by side. The garden we now plant is indeed ours to enjoy, but we cultivate it also for our children and our grandchildren and the future that they look forward to. 

This virtuous cycle of planting and watering and tending and harvesting is an inexhaustible mystery, and one that I am thankful for every day.