A few days ago, the girls and I trudged into a nearby store. The wind beat at our hunched backs, nagging our hair into ratty cords that stuck to our cheeks. The store’s nursery inventory was disappearing from the shelves with every wave of turbulence. The shelves themselves were rolling away from the entrances. Above the roar of the dust storm was the desperate flapping of the flag. It was strange how it drowned out the other sounds. I thought of it not as significant, but as a curious. Any other flag on the same pole would flap as loudly.
I worried then for my tomato plants. The flowering peas. The fledgling corn and sunflowers recently sprouted. The artichokes waiting to be planted in peat pots where they could adjust to their new home.
I checked the plants the next day after the storm had past. The tomatoes, three of them nestling inside water-filled plant protectors, were healthy. The other plants were hugging the ground, only the newest growth looking up to the sun. The peat pots were strewn under the peripheral weeds along the garden bed, their passengers appearing very dead.
Jake’s motorcycle is surprisingly smooth over the patchwork road. The air in my helmet feels stale, clogging my lungs rather than filling them. I adjust the vent over my forehead. A weak breeze tattoos into my face. The “fresh” air smells of summer, leather, and exhaust.
It’s our seventh anniversary. More years than I have been in my twenties. The bike accelerates, my fingers clutching at Jake’s black leather jacket. I remind myself to breathe. My body writhes with anxiety and thrill. Interesting how the two go hand in hand. I watch the road ahead with interest, wondering when it will end.
We’re so different now than seven years ago. So different from that year of married infancy. I still wonder how he caught me. I was nothing more than a child when he knelt at the waterfalls holding the ring I wear on my left hand. I was nothing more complicated than a bird flitting from one seed to the next, never satisfied with one tree, one yard, one perch. Feral and harmless.
A far cry from the person I am now. Tamed. Loved. Loving. Needed. Needing.
Happy.
The first windswept year left us both hugging the ground. I checked the garden again yesterday morning. The sunflowers are again following their namesake. The peas are producing pods. The artichokes are bearing new leaves. The surviving plants look stronger than before, their stems thicker.
Something to be said for storms.