It’s astonishing how little effect the ravages of time and the daily travails of living with me have had on my very sweet but legendarily stubborn wife, Michele.
Any marriage expert will tell you to never expect to change your spouse, and in my experience this is so true. Despite my best efforts, I have not convinced her that eating cinnamon rolls with a spoon is just plain wrong. Neither have I persuaded her that it’s totally okay to change lanes in an intersection when turning from a one-lane road to a two-lane road.
But it’s all good. Over time, the spoon and changing-lanes things just stopped mattering as much. Maybe I’m low-T. I’m definitely getting older. I’m usually tired. I watch too much cable news. All of this combines to sap a dude’s willpower.
Or, possibly, maybe, it’s something else. Maybe, without even really trying, I won an important battle I didn’t even know I was fighting. Or maybe I just got lucky. You see, very gradually, despite no family history of gardening, Michele has become a gardener.
People used to ask, “Do you both garden?” And my answer always was, “I make the garden. Michele enjoys it.” And she did, and for that I was grateful—for the rope it gave me to till in ever more lawn and also for the lack of interference in my whims.
But all that has changed. Now we’re both gardeners, and it’s pretty damned cool.
I still do most of the heavy lifting, but if I don’t get around to removing suckers from the crabapple quickly enough, there she is, going at them. It was Michele who whacked our overgrown ‘Shasta’ viburnum into submission, and later uttered in a dark voice, “It has to go.” And out it went! Most of it anyway. I still have to grub out the stump.
When we’re driving along—and not arguing about a lane change—I’ll often point out a tree and challenge her to identify it. Usually, she gets it right. It is Michele who leads most of the tours of our garden, doing it with more enthusiasm than I ever did. Our vacations invariably include botanical gardens. Some even revolve around gardens.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve corrupted her by dragging her into my weirdo horticultural world, but it has given us many joyful hours of good, clean fun together at home and at fabulous places around the country, plus lots of entertaining times with gardening friends.
And whenever I bake cinnamon rolls on a Sunday morning and Michele grabs a spoon, I just go to my happy place: Scott Arboretum, on a sunny spring day, with Michele at my side.
