The Minister’s Pansies

Every summer the minister in town takes his family back to Cape Cod for two weeks. Last year, he hired my daughter to water their garden. It’s not a high-maintenance garden – just a vegetable patch, a border of impatiens and six large urns loaded with pansies.

After dinner, my daughter and I would grab our watering cans and walk over to the minister’s house. In the slanting light of dusk, we’d work in tandem, filling the cans from a spigot and carrying them back and forth through the yard.

I love watering a garden. It’s so peaceful: hearing the water pitter-pat on the ground, watching the earth turn dark and fertile, knowing you are helping something grow. I find it soulful.

The job was going smoothly until one night while waiting for her to finish, I took a better look at one of the urns of pansies. The minister’s wife had planted them in the early spring.

Now in late summer, the pansies were leggy and overgrown, draping over the edges as if trying to escape their potted fate. On closer inspection, I also noticed the pots were choked with weeds. From far away, they looked lush and green, but from up close: chaotic and wild.

I pulled a few weeds and pinched off some brown stems. I should szhoosh up these pots, I said to myself. It wouldn’t take much to turn them around. The minister’s wife would be surprised, impressed, grateful even. Maybe I thought (though I swear, not consciously) she might even like me more.

A bit about the minister’s wife: she’s not your stereotypical minister’s wife. She dresses hip and has curly hair like Andie Mcdowell’s. She has her own career, speaks fluent German and named her daughter after the poet Auden. She’s also from the East Coast which I like to think explains her surprising (because she is the minister’s wife) reserve, but some days I think – maybe she just doesn’t dig me.

Or maybe, she just doesn’t know me that well. Generally, I think I have a few things to offer: I can be fun sometimes, I speak fluent trash TV and I’m always up for a book recommendation – plus I’m a big eater, which I think makes other women feel relaxed and/or dainty around me (either way, I figure, a good thing).

But in the garden? Oh yeah, in the garden, I am the one you want to have at the party.

So I got to work. I started pulling weeds and deadheading until my fingers hurt. My daughter begged to go home, somehow sensing that something in our peaceful ritual had gone wrong.

The next night I brought over clippers and fertilizer. I pruned efficiently, humming along and imagining myself being invited over for dinner or a glass of wine. I stood back and took a look. The weeds were gone, and the rogue stems clipped off, but now the pots looked a little lean.

This is when I turned into a woman on-the-verge. I seriously contemplated going to the store and buying more pansies to add to the pots. Yes. And here’s what’s even sicker: I actually did. Luckily, the stores were out of the yellow variety she had planted. Really, thank goodness, because that would have been very bad.

As self-realization seeped in, I pulled my fingers out of her pots. I hate this part of myself that needs so desperately to be liked. It’s taken decades of hard work to reel it in. Being older and more self-aware, I’m mostly able to stop myself, though sometimes it can take a while.

I do like the minister’s wife. We are friendly just not good friends. But if our friendship is meant to evolve, it will have to grow organically.

I also like gardening, so at least my little jaunt into psychosis was enjoyable. Plus I gotta say this — about two weeks after the minister’s family returned, those pansies were looking so goooood.