OK, it was a serious lapse in judgment, but he was desperate. It was Mother’s Day and he was unprepared. At first blush, some might regard it as admirable that men of a certain age do not connect Mother’s Day and their wives in the same thought. Wives are forever young and beautiful in their minds. This is good, right?
Well, no. After a lifetime of enforcing good hygiene, reasonable table manners and inducing compassion in even the most recalcitrant males, wives have good reason to expect to be remembered on Mother’s Day by both their children and husbands. Which is why he had sent out an all-points alert to the four corners of the country to five young men under age 30 as May 16 loomed on the horizon. Be grateful for who you are, he reminded them, because there is a person who deserves more credit than either yourself or your father.
And it was not that the cobbler’s child had failed to repair his own shoes. He had dutifully consulted the online purveyor of antique varieties of rose bushes that would help repopulate his wife’s (not his mother’s) garden after a particularly brutal winter where a few of her beloved had perished from the unrelenting elements.
From among the hundreds of varieties displayed on the website, he carefully chose the correct hardiness zone, then chose from the appropriate shades of white, with possible hints of dawn apricot and pale peach. No bossy reds or showy yellows for his New England pale beauty.
Finally, thinking well ahead, he specified a delivery date the week before Mother’s Day so that there would be no drought-induced stupor to contend with when the New Dawn and Icebergs arrived. Then he waited in smug satisfaction.
You can imagine his panic when he received a polite and cheerful email response from the antique rose dealer that his order would be shipped as requested and arrive the Monday after Mother’s Day. What could one do? Argue with a mute website that lists no contact information for just this reason? Compose a note to your beloved (not your mother), that she could expect recognition of her life’s greatest work sometime in the foreseeable future? Compose a poem, which because that was what he had usually done when short-handed in the gift department, had become a bit shopworn?
Nothing would do.
On the Sunday morning of the actual event, while stewing over the inherent injustices of shopping on the Internet, he blurted out something he had no idea he was going to say the moment before it came tumbling unbidden from his mouth. He announced he was giving her 40 hours of labor in her garden for Mother’s Day.
Now there is a certain retributive justice in this momentary lapse of judgment, since he had never been and never wanted to be a gardener—not to say her gardener. He was, after all, more experienced with a chainsaw than a trowel. Plus he knew what treading on his wife’s carefully laid out pride and joy would risk, he did not want to use the term micro-management when it came to her precise sense of the arrangement of annuals and perennials. Let’s just say the garden, as expansive as it was, seemed a small space in which to share a vision.
But all this was anticipatory purgatory. He needed a plan and one, thank God, appeared in a split second. Plus, it was quite clear that brute force gardening was necessary in the short run. For the previous several years of deferred garden maintenance while she was attending to unending family needs, an exceptionally noxious weed had almost completely overtaken her garden.
For those of you who have not experienced the guerilla tactics of bishop’s weed, you could say that any bishop would be proud to share its successful colonizing strategies. Its roots go deep and then long and strangle nearly everything in its path. It spreads underground more perniciously than any of its more desirable neighbors. It sprouts early and shades out those plants it does not kill outright. And even when you dig up its roots, they break off in your hand so it will re-sprout and continue its chokehold as soon as you turn you back.
Her soft and fuzzy wooly lamb’s ears were nearly dead. Untangling the bishop’s weeds roots from the Solomon’s seal required the skill of a neurosurgeon. And you can forget about enjoying early season tulips or the late blooming delphinium. Buckets upon buckets of them went on to the compost heap. It was like a medieval battle, the dead bodies were piled deep and he still had 28 hours to make good on his exceptionally rash gift. Rash seemed like the appropriate word.
With about seven hours of labor left, a funny thing happened. He was hauling a bucket of bishop’s weed out of the garden, and while stopping to dig out the unsightly dandelions from the edge of the driveway he noticed that the dead bodies of the bishop’s weed on the compost pile had sprouted. Their green leaves looked almost pretty.
He had heard that some misguided people actually plant bishop’s weed as an ornamental. And it occurred to him that he might call a truce in this hopeless war: he would agree to transplant the bishop’s weed to the side of the driveway in place of the dandelions if the bishop’s weed would agree to cease and desist.
And that’s what happened. He is now embarrassed to admit it, but he has recently been seen watering these miscreants at the side of the driveway when just 40 hours earlier he had considered them to be ruthless garden enemies. And he is even more embarrassed to admit that even after having served all his time, he still cannot quite leave the scene of battle. Be careful, he reminds her, of what you wish.
Philip Conkling is the founder and president of the Island Institute.