Lazy Wife

I'm on the phone.

I'm on the phone, searching out beans. This year, Rob and I have secured a plot in a nearby community garden, and I am launched by excitement into premature gardening overdrive. I spent a goodly chunk of this morning planting tomato seeds into infuriatingly dusty peat mix, armed with a sprayer and a chopstick. Assorted Brandywines, Stupice, tiny yellow Coyotes. All seems to have gone well. Now, talking to an organic heirloom seed seller, from whom I have ordered Northeaster and Rattlesnake beans, I describe the exact bean I am seeking.
It's one of those ones you can eat at any stage, I say. It's really easy to shell; I think it was one of the first string-less beans...
Ah, she says, you're looking for 'Lazy Wife'.

Lazy Wife. The name kind of says it all, doesn't it?

I spend a moment picturing the harried farm wife of old, awake before dawn coaxing the embers in the wood stove to life before going out to pump water for breakfast, tea, a day of washing and cleaning and cooking. She pauses for a moment, perhaps at the grave-site of one of her nine children to say a quick prayer, then hurries back to the kitchen, lugging the metal water pail. She lives in a time when any effort to lighten her impossibly heavy load will be regarded as "lazy".
Yes, I say. That's the one. That's the bean I want.

What is that sound, anyway?

When I was a teenager, I became convinced that I would die in a gun battle. My death, as I foresaw it, would be untimely; I would be murdered by the bullet of a criminal. No matter that I grew up in a Mennonite family in a quiet Mennonite town. No matter that my home life was peaceful and calm, that my mother gardened and cooked, that I walked daily with my dog in the overgrown apple orchard behind our home. I dreamed nightly of the bad men who were coming to shoot me.

I'm walking the dogs through a spring field of last year's grass, riddled with mouse holes and mole paths. We crunch through brown oak leaves and twigs, gray with lichen. Last year's evening primrose stalks, furry rosettes of mullein, soft and minty-gray. Across the field I notice a rock covered in mosses and lichens. If someone asked me to name the most life affirming thing I can think of, it might be this; this field, these dogs, this rock. The rock is ancient, gray, pitted. How can it possibly support such an intricate emerald forest? Yet it does, testament to the sheer persistence of life.
Squatting beyond the field, there are hulking rows of immense houses, perched on the edge of this park by the river. I remember when there were fields and forests there, too, remember a time before this became a trendy area to live in a luxury home, near the riverbank. Before the foxes and deer were driven away. It seems to me, that somewhere along the way to becoming ourselves, we all got lost. We looked at the limitless wonder around us and instead of embracing and revering it, we shrank away in fear. The fear of what it could do to us. Then, we imagined that we could keep ourselves and each other safe from the world and we started saying and doing stupid things, in order to minimize our perceived risk. We built all manner of walls and fences and compounds; we filled drowning ponds with concrete; we dammed raging rivers; we killed the wild animals because we imagined how they might hurt us. We barricaded ourselves from nature. And we hid indoors.

There is a saying that you don't hear the shot that kills you, in the same way that you don't smell your own brakes burning on the highway. When I contemplate this, I think of my old friend Ann, long dead these years, saying, Now how could a person claim to know a thing like that?

Indeed, I am in the mood to challenge that saying.
In fact, if I keep still for a moment, I believe I can hear that bullet now, a faint, far-off whistle, approaching fast, like a runaway train.