I am completely blindsided by his statement about insipid gardening and insipid worship. I never made the connection between the two and now I can't help but wonder what he really meant when he'd offered me that 'all-inclusive' landscaping deal. All I wanted him to do is fix my yard. In the process, I am finding out that there is more that needs to be fixed than my weed-infested lawn.
The next few days I just follow him around without asking any questions. While I water the lawn and the garden with the old hose, he picks up broken branches, pulls a weed here and a stray crocus there. One day he replaces the rotten wood and fixes the sagging backyard fence. Another he brings over an ancient but, ah so gorgeous and very well-built rocking bench and sets it among the azalea bushes. We sit there in silence, listening to the sounds of life all around us.
We always take a lunch break. In my former life, I never used to do that since it seemed like such a colossal waste of the prime hour of the day on something so inconsequential as eating food. However, after my seven-year long manure fast I find all my taste buds are wide awake and eager to celebrate food in all its flavors, textures and delightful varieties.
He asks me to teach him some Serbian phrases, so I decide to hit him with the hardest and make him conjugate verb ishchachkati person, gender, number and tense. We laugh together as he butchers the grammar and pronunciation of my mother tongue. I threaten to make him go through all seven declensions of the diminutive form of the word komarac – singular and plural if he doesn't improve. We meander through our conversations like we are strolling through the woods - pausing to notice a wild flower on the side of the pathway, or hear the gurgling of a creeks miniature waterfalls. We don't see eye to eye on many things. I shake my head as he fails to convince me of the value of country music. But I am surprised that we can talk politics for hours without getting mad at each other.
It feels as if my life has entered some kind of a time warp and I’m shocked to learn that I actually like it. By my former supersonic standards, life has slowed down to an unbearable crawl. Surprisingly each day I am discovering more life in and around me than I ever experienced when my speed was breaking the sound barrier. I am also becoming more self-conscious of my noise-making ways that drown out the voice of the wind and the song of the rain. I feel like I have so much to learn...
Each day I am getting more and more used to his pace – he is always working, and yet never rushing and somehow always resting. Even though he doesn’t wear a watch, he just knows the right time… for everything. At first it’s really hard to wake up each morning not knowing every dot, ampersand and underscore of my day. But I am learning to wait on his cue. Sometimes they are as subtle as the truckload of manure dumped on my driveway. Other times it’s as loud as the footsteps on the St. Augustine grass.
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