The Gardener and His Wife
They were mad.
He sat in his garden, a broad-brimmed hat perched atop his head. All through the day he leaned carefully into the sun to shade the fragile seeds emerging from the earth between his vee'd legs. He was a man who cared about his garden.
He'd carefully prepared the back yard in triangled blocks, leaving enough room for his large posterior at the apex of each triangular point before the line of the next triangle appeared. The sides of each triangle were exactly the length of his legs.
He spent approximately fifteen minutes at a time at a triangulated point before moving on to the next one in some mysterious pattern that only he comprehended. Sometimes he would move to the one right next to the one he was leaving. Other times, with his forefinger held up in an attitude of remembering something, he would hurry, zig-zagging, to a triangulated spot far away.
He stayed very busy. Sometimes he removed his hat and held it just above the surface of the earth all day, waiting for the seeds to emerge. The top of his bald head would burn and peel in ugly brownish papery curls. If he saw bugs, even ants on the soil surface, he carefully removed and smashed them between his thumb and third finger, though he purchased ladybugs and preying mantises to protect his adult plants from pests. He kept a large plastic bottle filled with distilled water and sprayed the surface of the soil so that the seedlings could push through the surface and rise into the light without difficulty.
He thought of earthworms as leviathans in a small sea, romping in the depths and supplying bounty for his seeds, though sometimes he worried that they might disturb the seeds before they sprouted.
He was a true lover of his garden. He cared far less for what his garden produced than he took pleasure in the young plants. He planted cabbages, lettuce, tomatoes, peas, corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, okra, and eggplant. He loved the color and smell of the emerging plants, the tenderness of their uncurling leaves, the bold assumption of their crinkled leafy shapes.
When the plants had grown taller than his chin when he was seated, he lost interest. His wife would get his permission to gather the bounty and then care for the plants until they were ready.
She annoyed him greatly, though he never said anything. She would untidily water the plants, leaving them swimming messily in pools of water, throw a final handful of fertilizer all over each plot, not even caring if it landed on the leaves. When she went back in the house, he would carefully remove all traces of the fertilizer from each leaf.
While he painstakingly cared for his garden in this manner, and when she was not busy caring for his abandoned plants, his wife went out and stole buttons.
Her thefts were accomplished by lurking surreptitiously in the clothing areas of department stores. She was good at it and did not really disturb the clothing on the racks: She searched the hems for little cardboard squares on which were stitched buttons that matched the ones that marched smartly down the front of the dress or the coat or whatever garment it was.
She would never steal anything from the button section of a fabric shop or department store. That would be wrong. Sometimes she bought packaged buttons because she could not resist them. The last six buttons she had bought were Disney characters: Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy, the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast leaning together, and Cinderella.
Back home, she had thousands of buttons: white and green and yellow and blue and pink and red and black buttons, checked ones, striped buttons, polka-dotted buttons, brass, silver, gold, nobbly, nubbly, smooth, rough, fabric-covered buttons, bone buttons, wooden buttons, mother-of-pearl buttons. It would take too long to tell you about all her buttons.
She mounted each one on a board with others after deciding that the new one belonged in this or that family of buttons that she had created. White buttons with white, red with red, separated by color and arranged by size. Under each was a legend giving the date and the store from where she had stolen or bought the button.
"What are you going to do with all those buttons?" her anxious husband demanded.
"Nothing," she said. "I just love buttons."
"I love gardening, too." he said, understanding.
Anne Yohn
May 2000