He went to lie down in his green room across the hall from mine. He'd spent the last few days in there, swimming in fever drenched sheets and coughing into the silence. I had tried, at first, to be the wife I never was. Bringing home chicken soup and NyQuil. Sitting on the bed, patting him on the back and there there-ing. It didn't fit. I was too late and too filled up with insecurity and anger. We had patterns imprinted across the fabric of our interactions, and the colors of our love once again bled together until they ran only in muddy rivers.
Today, when he stumbled down the hall headlong into slumber, I turned to the Garden. Help me. I begged. Help me be a better person.
And so began my first pea shelling experience.
The vines had been heavy and swollen with overgrown pea pods, quickly filling my bowl to the brim. I knew I had neglected them far too long to be good just as they were, that I would need to put in some work and go a little deeper. Search out the pearls inside the pods. Pea shelling, I discovered, is relaxing and centering and humbling all at once. You cannot shell a bowl of peas and rush on with life at the same time. Each pod is a unique gift to unwrap, each pea a miracle of perfect beauty and simplicity.
I had watched them dangling on their vines like gaudy oversized earrings, and I had treated the idea of picking and shelling them like a chore to be dreaded and delayed. Yet, in my desire for the peas, I had overlooked how greatly the entire process was capable of blessing me. A bag of peas is just a bag of peas. These peas were breaths in and breaths out, the passing minutes of the hours of the days of my life. They were my thoughts and smiles. My touch, working to grow something that I could touch, that I could give to another. Gone in an instant, maybe. Or everlasting, who knows.
Not the getting, but the getting there.
Two peas in a pod. We are getting there, him and I. It may not be where we had ever intended to end up, and it still even now may be a hard place to go. But we are getting there. And although it is a road that has two separate paths at the end of it, we are getting there together.
I made him my version of chicken soup. It was a little late, I knew that. And it came with a lot of apologies for things I will never be able to make right. But it had my special peas in it, so that at least he knew it had my real, honest, all-I've-got-getting-there love in it.
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