On missed buses, uncut flowers, and the time we are unexpectedly given
Yesterday began with the small injustice of a bus that arrived early and left Ali behind.
Ali had been at the stop five minutes ahead of schedule, so Keith and I decided to drive our first-born out to folkhögskolan after dropping off the younger three. Once Ali was deposited at Folkis, we decided the morning had already abandoned its original plan and might as well become a small date.
So we added a side quest to Älvdalens trädgård to pick flowers for our anniversary. Twenty-one years married this week and twenty-six years together, because September 3 has always done double duty for us.
As Keith pointed out, our marriage is now old enough to order a beer in the United States.
I watched the instructional video on YouTube, naturally. Keith dutifully took charge of the bucket. I began the grave and exacting work of choosing flowers.
The very first dahlia I noticed was also, quite obviously, the most beautiful one in the entire garden. It was enormous, coral pink and mathematically extravagant, with every precisely arranged petal holding beads of morning dew. The exactness gave the morning somewhere to rest.
And lounging in the middle of it was a honeybee.
Other bees were flying busily around the garden. This one could have left. She simply did not. Even as I leaned closer and closer with my camera, she remained there giving me the calmest, most unmistakable side-eye, as if to say:
Yes, you have correctly identified the finest flower in the garden. No, it is not available.
Or perhaps simply:
this is too nice to flee.
I had come there specifically to cut flowers, but there are limits. She had found it first. Or perhaps we found it together and she had possession. Either way, I let her keep her absurdly plush vantage point.
That dahlia never entered the bouquet. It became its beginning instead. Everything I chose came after the flower I was willing to leave behind.
A dahlia only looks like one flower. It is actually a gathering of many small florets arranged into one astonishing form.
Marriage may be something like that too: one name for thousands of acts too ordinary to commemorate separately.
Driving a child when the bus fails.
Watching the instructions.
Holding the bucket.
Waiting patiently while your wife conducts a negotiation with a bee.
The conventional anniversary-flower list gives the twentieth year to the aster, a botanical cousin of the dahlia, then leaves the twenty-first mysteriously flowerless. Fine. We will appoint our own.
The coral-pink dahlia it is.
The bouquet we brought home is not a bridal bouquet.
It is late summer: wine-dark red, coral, blush, pale green and purple; tight geometry beside unruly stems; flowers at their fullest beside buds that have not yet opened. There is a little vipphortensia from our own garden tucked in as well.
Not a promise made before life happens, but abundance after it has.
Two flowers did not fit in the larger vase, so they came upstairs to the little vase beside my bed. I like flowers beside my bed and on my desk, small pieces of the garden changing the rooms in which I work and wake.
The bus was early. We were early.
But the day gave us time back.
Perhaps after twenty-one years, marriage is less about getting the timing exactly right than knowing what to do with the time you are unexpectedly given.
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