Between the Bricks

In the spring, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love*, my middle-aged husband’s fancy turns to thoughts of lavish landscaping. His neck swivels at an artful display of mulch the way other men ogle scantily clad women. He regales me endlessly with grandiose plans for building a “simple little” retaining wall/covered deck/gazebo . This is generally where I call a screeching halt to the conversation by waving our sadly deficient checkbook around and crush all his horticultural hopes and dreams. He then helpfully suggests that my heart is three sizes too small and our compromise eventually shakes out to purchasing hanging baskets for the front porch.

My husband scouts out the offerings, and inevitably falls deeply in love with something that looks like this.

I know this looks lovely, but he conveniently forgets that we live in Atlanta where the median summer temperature is 146 degrees and the front porch gets direct sun 19 hours a day. Like any new lover, he faithfully waters the baskets morning and night and tenderly whispers sweet nothings to them as he gently plucks their dead leaves, but as in most relationships, sooner or later…. he has to go out of town. You thought I was going to say he forgets, didn’t you? Well, HE doesn’t forget . I do. I halfheartedly try, but morning comes really early, and I’ve heard you shouldn’t water in the heat of day, and at night it’s… dark, and, ….I just can’t remember, ok?

So quicker than you can say, “Miracle NO”, our baskets look like this.

For those of you with inquiring minds, that green thing sprouting is probably a misguided acorn that fell there last fall. Why yes, now that you mention it, we DON’T have any shame and we DO leave these specimens on the porch year round so we can be confronted by our inadequacies on a daily basis.

As I came in the front door the other day, thinking how beautifully the burned out porch light complemented the desiccated flower baskets, I noticed this:

In case you can’t believe your eyes, apparently one lone petunia seed from a bygone season’s basket fell and sprouted BETWEEN THE BRICKS.

This seed thrived for more than a year in a hostile environment between two bricks and mortar, through one of Atlanta's coldest winters (including multiple snowstorms) with absolutely no care or attention, yet last spring the entire basket was deader than a dodo in less than a month under the protective onslaught of all my husband's ministrations. (Pay no attention to him mumbling that my black thumb needs to take responsibility...)

I know there's a lesson here somewhere and I'm looking really hard between the bricks to find it. "Bloom where you're NOT planted" doesn't seem quite right, yet “Why Bother?” is a little too fatalistic to motivate (and probably won’t get embroidered on a pillow anytime soon).

I suppose, as with most things, the happy medium is somewhere in the middle. The first couple of years after Eli’s accident, we figuratively fertilized and watered that child darn near to extinction. He initially thrived, and then, like the baskets, inexplicably dried up around the edges and seemed to plateau, making very little progress, just eking out a minimal existence. Everyone adapted; Pete went back to work, I went back to school, Maddy, Sawyer and Hudson did their thing, and we settled into a new normal.

But lately, we’ve seen a couple of little sprouts in the most unexpected places, so we’ve hauled out the watering can and are spraying Miracle-Gro like mad. I’ll let you know if something breaks through.

*Courtesy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” - I knew that English degree would be good for something someday.