The Lucky Ones

Our labor realized in the crowns of marigolds, blue eyes of the hydrangeas, smell of lavender and late bloom of the hosta’s erect purple flower with its marvel of thick green leaves. In our twilight every year we trimmed back and the garden grew more lustrous and untamable as if the eternal woods and animals asleep at night in its beds were claiming it back. The water in the pool shimmered an icy Tuscan blue. When we arrived we swam until the stress from the grueling life in the city released our bodies. Later we sat under the umbrella and watched a garter snake slip into the water, careful not to startle its flight-or-fight response. Its barbed-wire coil. Comet of danger, serpent of the water, how long we had thwarted the venom of its secret lures and seductions. It swam by arching then releasing its slithery mercurial form. Through the lanky trees we heard the excited cries of the neighbor’s children—ours, the boy in our late youth, of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager. It was a miracle, our ignorance. It was grace incarnate, how we never knew.