Good Days

She didn't hate her husband. She couldn't place the feeling that came over her when he sat at the table and spent his day staring at one sheet from his legal pad. She thought about how she'd ended up in a cottage baking for bearded men who wrote poems, sometimes sewing with their wives - women who didn't seem to like one another much, but bound themselves together out of necessity. 

It was necessary because they needed the company. 

On the days they lost their partners to art, they could cling to one another. 

Katherine sighed. She looked out her front door. She leaned against the frame and looked past the tree that never once wore a swing, and beyond that to her patch of wildflowers. Roby dug the space for her on their two year anniversary. They brought rocks up from the creek to contain her space. They tilled the soil together. It wasn't a large plot. It wasn't a whole garden. It was a lovely gift from a husband who once upon a time encouraged her to love wild things.

Once they'd prepared the spot, he left her alone to toss handfuls of seeds onto the dirt. She didn't want a designed garden with perfectly aligned plants. She didn't want a designed life, either, she thought. And that's how she ended up in a cottage baking for bearded men who wrote poems. Her marriage was the result of tossing seeds at the dirt. Some stick and grow. Some don't make it. 

And some end up in a vase on a table under a window where she once fell in love with the light.