Housekeeping

It's been fifteen years since we drove down an unlanterned street, peered up toward the one lit window of a hunched house, and somehow decided that that house must be ours. Most everything about the house was broken, and there was hardly any garden, and once we got inside we understood that each of the six slanting rooms was a shattering in desperate need of imagining. Year after year, we have imagined.

Yesterday, between client calls and mad frustrations (did the refrigerator have to die so spectacularly?), I went outside in the rain, walked to the street, and looked back at this house, now so skirted in with red bud limbs, blooming viburnum, royal dogwood, mighty columbine, the daggers of rising irises, and a lacy miniature maple. I don't understand how things grow—not really. I don't know how we all became such rich inheritors of bloom. But I am grateful for the small beauties of a small life remade. For pink in rain. For purple on the fringe.